Staying Pumped

Monitoring tyre pressures electronically, for four wheels or more.

- Ron Moon

Over the years I’ve used a number of brands of different tyre-pressure monitoring systems (TPMS), but more recently I needed one that kept a check on my camper tyres as well as the tyres on my tow rig.

The importance of that came to light when we were up north a while back and I destroyed a tyre on the camper, which on investigation had been slowly deflating to the point of overheating and delaminating. With my old system limited to just monitoring four tyres, I went looking for something else that could handle at least six tyres.

Nowadays there are even more makes and models of TPMS units, but after a bit of investigation I settled on the TPMS from ARB. They are not the cheapest you’ll find, nor are they the most expensive monitoring system, but I liked the way the display was part of the cigarette plug and you don’t have a separate display taking up space or vision at windscreen level. Plus there were other advantages.

There are two different versions available in the ARB TPMS line-up: one with internal sensors or the one with external sensors (which I chose). I’ve had monitoring systems before with internal sensors and they always seemed to get destroyed when some heavy-handed tyre fitter changed or repaired a tyre. I know these ARB units are different to the ones I had, but the suspicion remains and I’ve never lost or damaged an external sensor (yet?).