NORMANS on the HORIZON: Tire Monitoring

Before leaving on our current trip I purchased a tire monitoring system made by HawksHead Systems. The monitoring system alerts you if any of the RV or towed vehicle’s tires are loosing pressure hopefully allowing you to slow to a stop before a catastrophic blowout.

When we purchased our first Motorhome in Las Vegas years ago I was driving it home for the first time towing the Jeep behind. I had traveled about long enough to start getting bored. Remembering the CB radio I turned it on and just caught the tail end of a trucker conversation which I heard them say “… if he doesn’t notice it he’s going to have a big problem”. There wasn’t much traffic on the road at the time and I had noticed two trucks passing me. Using the CB radio I asked if they were talking about me. They said I had a rear tire going flat on the Jeep I was towing. It was half flat when I pulled over and checked. Since then I’ve been lucky and haven’t experienced another incident.

Over the years I have looked at many systems coming to market. Only one, which the tire sensor is mounted inside tire on the wheel, appeared to be reliable. But it was expensive and installation required all the tires to be removed and replaced adding to the cost. It also required the sensors to be replaced when the battery discharged.

All the systems I have looked at so far required replacing the sensors when the batteries ran out, at the cost of fifty dollars each or more! In fact one of the more popular systems made changes to their system so that the older sensors were no longer compatible and the older sensors could no longer be purchased from them. If only one sensor went bad, it requiring the re-purchasing of an entire new system!!

The Hawkshead Systems uses inexpensive replaceable batteries in their sensors. The monitor is portable and uses a rechargeable battery so it doesn’t need to been installed and connected to a power source. After recharging for 8hours it will monitor for around 192 hours.

I finally installed the TPMS while we were staying in Santa Maria. It involved setting the pressure for each tire position in the monitor. Then screwing the sensor on each tire. I wanted to put some miles on the system before discussing my experience. Well we’ve gone from Santa Maria to Tucson and I love the system. I was able to check the pressure in each tire at any time in a few seconds. The Hawkshead Systems also reports tire temperature. During the testing I was able to see the tire pressure increase and to my surprise I saw the temperature raise also. The sunny side was much warmer than the shade side. In normal use you don’t need to check the tires, you just drive and if the system detects a problem it sounds an alarm.

Here is the sensor on the front tire of the motorhome.