Tires Supplement - Fleet Maintenance Magazine

Automatic Tire Pressure Monitoring Can Help Reduce Tire Maintenance Cost

Tire manufacturers agree that a primary cause of premature tire failure and poor tread life is under-inflation. Not only does it cause excessive heat build-up in the tire creating dangerous driving conditions, but it also shortens tire life by rapidly increasing treadwear.

The detection and prevention of under-inflation can also help to reduce occurrences of accelerated treadwear, zipper ruptures, overheating and devulcanization, all of which can be caused by under-inflation and often resulting in casing damage to a point where retreading is no longer an option.

Truck Fleet operators know that tires accounts for a large part of a vehicle’s maintenance cost, and regularly checking tire pressure is one of the most important maintenance procedures, yet one of the most difficult to enforce. Even the best preventive maintenance program will find that maintenance personnel too often overlook checking some tires or even entire vehicles. However, even the best maintenance programs can’t prevent tire damage resulting from a loss of air pressure while on the road.

With growing concerns over continuously rising tire and fuel cost, tire pressure monitoring can be an invaluable tool in helping to reduce both your fuel and tire maintenance cost.With recent advances in microchip technology, electronic tire pressure monitoring is now an affordable for both large and small fleet operations. The Tire Sentry System uses advanced RF microchip technology to continuously monitor tire pressure from inside the cab. This wireless remote sensing system enables low tire pressure to be automatically detected by using electronic tire sensors (electronic valve caps), to warn the driver/operator when any tire has lost as little as 10% of its normal operating pressure.Electronic tire pressure monitoring can be a particularly useful tool to support, or enhance most any Preventive Maintenance program, while also providing the following benefits associated with good tire maintenance:

• Automatically monitors for low tire pressure reducing the need for manual pressure checks.

• Frees yard personnel for other task, (fleets expend hundreds of man hours a year to do this time consuming task).

• Helps to extend useful tire life of both new and retread tires.• Helps to reduce road service calls.

• Helps to increase fuel efficiency.• Increases the efficiency of PM programs.

• Helps to reduce overall tire and maintenance cost.

The Tire Sentry system offers such outstanding potentials for extending useful tire life and reducing maintenance cost that it was awarded the “Best New Product of the Mid-America Trucking Show”, and “One of the Best New Products of the Year”, by an official publication of the SAE.

The Tire Sentry has been judged to be the most cost effective and user friendly tire pressure monitoring systems on the market today.

Real Time Pressure Monitoring: The Tire Sentry system will continuously monitor for a loss of tire pressure 24 hours a day on the road or in the yard. Whether operating 1 vehicle or an entire fleet, the Tire Sentry system can help to reduce tire maintenance cost, and increase useful tire life by thousands of miles. Tire Sentry systems can be factory programmed for Vehicle Specific, or Fleet Specific operation.