Are Our Tires REALLY that sensitive?

Tires, like most other items put under pressure, are built within a range of tolerances.

The water pipes in your MH have a set of tolerances.

Manufacturer specifications are a good thing to follow. I have used Michelin's recommended tire pressure/loaded weight table and never had a problem.

I feel the same way. My truck tires last 5 years before the tread wears out. Two of my FW tires had catastrophic failures within 100 miles and they were less than two years old and had less than 10,000 miles on them. I've had issues with tires in the past, so I check the pressures every morning before I start off. I run 65 mph or less on the highway. The last one blew out about a hundred miles into the trip and the sun was just coming up, so overheating and under-inflation weren't an issue.

I would like to go on a trip, but don't dare leave the driveway unless I have new tires on my FW.

My husband's opinion, and he's been "into cars" for almost 65 yrs, believes people are the cause of tire problems. 1) factory defect, 2) overloading the rig, 3) old tires, and 4) axle alignment problems. The last one has caused our friends to pay for many tires. They had an axle break on their TT. It was "welded" back together, but looking at it, you can see the tires aren't lined up right.....

The idea of scales on each wheel area is good......but don't see that happening. We pull into weigh stations that aren't open and weigh our rig.

You're overthinking the weather thing/air pressure....:) Relax, enjoy. After 45-50 yrs of traveling, we've not had a tire blow yet on a rig.

oh --- I KNOW there will be someone that comes on here and says I'm all wrong.. You'll get 1000 different ideas..... :) This is just our opinions.

After owning a TPMS for about a year, I can tell you this, the temperature and PSI swing of these tires is amazing. Add to it that it's very likely you will leave at one ambient temperature and arrive at something very different. Unless you stop once an hour and let the tires cool down, re-check, and adjust accordingly, you are basically within a range. A very wide range. So I agree with you, check them cold when you leave and you are good. The parameters for these tires vary so vastly, even on the MH that close enough is the name of the game. Heck my one front tire closer to the manifold and genset always runs 5 degrees hotter than the rest. The inner duals run hotter than the outers due to less airflow. Setting it before you leave is the best you can do. While travelling they experience such a range of terrain, temps etc and fluctuate accordingly, outside of auto adjusting constantly, they do what they do.

Not sure much discussion is needed. Basically YOUR decision is whether to follow "best practices" or "what I can get away with".

The tire manufacturers have excellent resources for the proper "care and feeding" of your tires, including how to properly treat them when stored, proper PSI etc.

Is a couple of pounds critical-- of course not. But being within a reasonable range at or above the minimum recommended PSI for your actual load going to make for better handling and ride, better tire life and safety-- sure. That is why the tire engineers spent all that time writing those guides.

Unlike automobile tires that have a narrow range of recommended PSI's, the correct PSI for our tires range 70 to 110 PSI. WAY too wide a range to be guessing.

But, it is your motorhome-- you decide what is important to you.

Well the pressure part is easily remedied by weighing your rig, airing up to the proper pressure, and installing one of the TSPMS products discussed ad infinitum on this and other forums.

Little is said about tire selection and most people are price conscious and tend to select a product merely by price.

I gotta say that I drove my new purchase home (empty) on a nearly flat tire on one of the duallies in back and I was on pins and needles all the way. I looked in the paperwork supplied with the coach and the service reports going back 2 years mentioned a problem with that tire. It was a leaking valve extender - an easily fixed problem. The 10 year old Goodyear on that axle held up for the 100 mile trip, so it wasn't all that fragile.

I weighed my rig once loaded up how it will travel. Inflated tires 5lbs over what inflation chart says for my weights. Check them every time before we leave. Have a tire pressure monitor system of some sort. At home when we park we park on rubber mud flaps.we don't cover our tires but is most likely a good idea.

Much bigger issue....RV'ers make RV'ing much more complicated than it is.

Doesn't matter if it is tires or black tank treatments -

mike brez wrote:
I weighed my rig once loaded up how it will travel. Inflated tires 5lbs over what inflation chart says for my weights. Check them every time before we leave. Have a tire pressure monitor system of some sort. At home when we park we park on rubber mud flaps.we don't cover our tires but is most likely a good idea.

Never understood the 5-10 PSi over the chart thing I see on here all the time. Why? If the chart says at x weight adjust to Y PSI, why would you go over? 10 miles down the road once they heat up now you are way outside the parameters specifically outlined in the chart. I don't get it. Over inflated tires can be just as bad as underinflated. Why wouldn't you go by the chart?

Good Morning.

I am a certified engineer, although not a tire engineer. My career was in the manufacture of medical devices where safety is of paramount concern. The load inflation tables were generated by hours of testing by lab rat engineers where the design of the tire was verified to meet safety requirements. What that means is that the tire was tested at the load, inflation, and speed listed in the inflation table and met or exceeded the requirements. If you ask the engineer what would happen if you deviate from the load inflation, you will get two answers. One, sponsored by the company attorneys and the prudent answer, is I don't have any data to predict what will happen sir. The second off the record answer is likely to be, higher inflation pressures over what is recommended in the table do not degrade safety, and inflation pressures below recommended for the load degrade safety performance in proportion to how much lower than recommended the tire is inflated. That being said, ambient air temperature, driving speed, road surface, age of tire, and history of tire all factor in to it's safety. No one can generate a accurate predictor using all those factors of what a tire may or may not do.

Given the high consequences of a blow out on a truck tire, the easy no worries approach is inflate them to the max pressure on the sidewall, weigh the coach to ensure it doesn't exceed the load rating, and replace them every five years.

However, higher than needed inflation pressures make the coach ride rougher and handle less than ideal. Replacement intervals can very widely. A tire could have less than a 100 miles but have been setting in the full Florida sun on wet sand when compared to a five year old tire with 50,000 miles that had been driven weekly. If there are no cracks in the high mileage tire, it may be more safe than the one that has not been driven. Moisture is the enemy of the steel belts. UV light is the enemy of the rubber. Driving the tire and getting it up to temperature dissipates the moisture, and causes UV protectants to bloom to the surface of the tire.

By far the biggest danger is running an underinflated tire for the load. In order to prevent that, one should know the load and the minimum inflation, plus check it periodically. Some invest in pressure monitoring systems to help them. Some use a tire gauge.

I add a third safety measure, and I see from your other posts you have invested in an IR thermometer. At each stop, I walk the coach and toad checking tire temperatures with my hand. I am looking for a tire that is hotter than the rest which would be one's early indication of underinflation.

No, they are not made of crystal. And the world does not come to an end if you are off a few psi one way or the other. Besides, it would be comical to test an array of tire gauges at the pressures we run to see how they compare to each other.

Sorry for the long discourse.