Alternate Route

Jul 15, 2009 - Nitrogen Long Term Test

Back in September 2007 I did a blog entry titled, Nitrogen: A Noble Gas? and it's time for a little follow up on how things are going.

If you take care of your tires, if your rotate them religiously, keep an eye out that you're running at the proper pressure in your tires, etc., then you're not really going to notice any changes running nitrogen in your tires.

Claims like improved mileage, better handling, and longer tire life aren't really accurate. A better way to put that would be to say that those things are "less bad" due to nitrogen and its one big benefit, more stable tire pressures. The longer your tires are at proper pressure, the less it hurts your mileage, handling, and tire wear.

I've been running nitrogen in all my tires for about two years now and that's the thing that's been most notable. The pressures in my tires have been remarkably consistent. Two incidents illustate this clearly. The first is the bicycle tires that we decided to fill with nitrogen back in the summer of '07. The bike got buried in the back of the shed and wasn't used much, but sat, along with three other bikes, for most of that time. Now bike tires are notoriously good "leakers" and lose pressure over time, so as expected, all the bike tires were down in pressure. But of the four bike, the three without nitrogen-filled tires were almost completely flat, while the bike with nitrogen still had 30+ pounds of pressure in each tire.

The second event that shows that nitrogen gives more consistent pressure occurred when I took my Versa in for a regular service at my dealer (who doesn't have a nitrogen system in their garage) and they forgot my instructions to not do any adjusting to my tire pressures. About two weeks after the service as the weather warmed up, my TPMS light came on and flashed for about a minute, then wnet steady for a bit and then went out. According to the manual, this was an indication of a TPMS system failure/problem. When I checked the tire pressures, three of the four were over 40 pounds and the fourth was at 38. So my buddies at Tire Town adjusted my pressures back to 35. A couple of weeks later, the weather gets even warmer and the same thing happens. So I ask the dealer if they adjusted tire pressure and they told me they had. But since they simply pumped air in, the tire pressures were being affected more by the heat. The blinking light was an indication the pressures were too high.

We have since purged the tires and replaced the nitrogen and haven't had an issue or variation in tire pressures at any check since.

And those original set of tires on the Versa? They were shot at 30,000 miles, never had nitrogen in them. The replacement set (other than the little air snafu described above) have run nothing but nitrogen. I have 27,000 miles on those tires and they appear to be less than halfway through their useable tread life. I think there's something to be said for running notrogen in your tires.

The next test vehicle I'm trying nitrogen on is my lawn tractor, another set of tires that gets to sit over a winter and are usually low in the spring!

3:16 am | Categories: nitrogen, tires Permalink | Alert Administrator

Add to: