Beginner Car Care Tire Pressure How to Check Inflate and Deflate Tires

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Hi, I'm Mike from 1A Auto.

In this video, we're going to really tackle a very basic car care item. This video is going to be geared more towards really the new driver, or somebody that doesn't know really about their car but is curious to learn. As you may have guessed from the title, we're going to talk about tires, in particular, checking and adjusting tire pressure.

All tires have a valve stem. It's usually black rubber, but sometimes silver. If you examine the valve closely, you'll see that there is a black or silver cap on some vehicles. You want to remove that cap. That cap is important, it keeps dust and dirt out of the valve.

Now, we're going to check the tire pressure. We're going to use a stick gauge, and we press it onto the tire. The gauge pushes out to show you the pressure, as you can see there. It's good to know how to use one of these correctly. You're going to see the stem is made of rubber. All that hissing there that you hear, that's me doing it on purpose. You want to make sure you push that gauge on there so you don't hear any hissing at all. It takes a firm push, and you kind of have to make sure you push straight against the valve stem. You can move it around a little bit until it stops. Once you get a good solid connection, then you'll get a good reading on the gauge.

Now, we're going to talk about removing air. We're going to close up, really close up on the valve, and you can see there's a little peg on the center on the gauge. There's a couple of different things that you can use. Push in the center and hear the air come to. That's how you would release air if you had too high a pressure in your tire. Here, we're going to check the pressure. It's about 40 there. Then we want it down near 33. We're going to press again and release air.

If you watch the tire close, you can actually see the tire change form a little bit. Recheck. It's come down some. What I like to do is count while I'm releasing it. Then on that count, I know how much comes out each time. We just let it out, check it and let it out again We're going to try and get it down to right around 32 to 33 PSI.

Now, let's talk about adding air or what to do if our pressure is low. I'll actually remove some air and you can see that our pressure is down below 30. We want to get it back up to the 32 to 33 range. You'll need an air compressor. The one I have is somewhat representative of what you might at a gas station/filling station, the one we have to add quarters or something. You press firmly. You hear there, I pressed lightly and you heard air come out of the tire. You want to press firmly. When you press firmly on this style, you'll get a gauge that pops out similar to the stick gauge. You press firmly on. Again, if I don't press firmly, I can hear a loud air escaping the tire. Press firmly on. That loud sound that you heard before was not correct. You want to hear this sound. Press firmly on. Press the fill button and you hear the go into the tire.I always double check with my stick gauge. I can see I actually have kind of overfilled it. I'm going to let some air out again to get it to the right pressure. Check again. I'm at that 32 to 33 mark.

Then always replace your valve stem cap. Again, it keeps the dirt and dust out of there, making sure that your tire doesn't deflate prematurely. We've shown you how to increase or inflate or deflate your tire and increase pressure.

Now, you may ask, how do I know what pressure my tire should be? All tires will have a max pressure on their side wall. You'll see I'm using a little chalk to bring out the letters there. You can see right there it says 51 PSI. That's the maximum recommended pressure for this tire by the manufacturer. I'm just going to zoom in a little better so you'll see that 51 PSI. There's a lot of other information but the 51 PSI is the most important for this video. On this other tire, you can see it's a little different. It's a 44 PSI maximum pressure. Those were the tire manufacturer. Now, your vehicle manufacturer will put a sticker either on the door pillar, or maybe it's on actually the door, the driver's door. You can see here, this is manufacturer's recommended pressure for the tires. The manufacturers have done all kinds of testing with the car and the 33 PSI you see here is what Volkswagen in this particular case feels is the best tire pressure. That has to do with comfort of the vehicle as well.

This may cause you to say, which one should I use? For the most part, you're going to want to use the vehicle manufacturer one. That's going to get you the best or most comfortable right. I have used the higher pressure in cases where I know I'm going to go on a long trip on fairly smooth highways. If you inflate to a higher pressure, you will get slightly better gas mileage because your tire will be slightly harder but you'll be sacrificing a little bit of ride comfort. In this case where we had a 44 PSI and a 51 PSI, I would only inflate the tires to the 44 PSI. You don't ever want to inflate the tire over the tire manufacturer's recommended pressure.

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