After my rather negative experience with the Nonda Zus Tire Safety Monitor which was only the second product in the history of this blog that I pulled a recommendation from, I was looking for another tire pressure monitoring system as my car does not have tire pressure monitoring. Fortunately for me the folks at Vesafe sent me their tire pressure mounting system to review.
Here’s what you get in the box.
You get four tire sensors that replace the valve caps. You also get a LCD screen that you plug into a 12V outlet.
Here’s one of the sensors. One of the things that I like about it is that you can see easily which wheel it goes on as the writing is on the top of the sensor.
One area where this tire pressure monitoring system beats the one from Nonda is that the metal that is used in the sensor appears to be brass. That’s important because Nonda’s sensors use some sort of alloy that is prone to galvanic corrosion. Meaning that the sensors had a tendency to fuse to the valve stems requiring you to cut the valve stem off and replace it if you wanted to put air into your tire. That of course is bad. In this case, seeing that the sensor is brass and valve stems tend to be brass as well, this should not be an issue. Having said that, I will still use dielectric grease to make sure that this is not an issue. Another plus is that the rubber gasket on the inside looks far more robust than what was in the Nonda offering which had a habit of getting stuck to the valve stem and coming off the sensor.
You also get a bag with anti-theft bolts, a wrench for said anti-theft bolts, and some spare parts. You also get a tool (on the right) to help you to disassemble the sensors to replace the batteries.
Installation is simple:
- Plug in the LCD screen into a 12v outlet.
- Turn on the car to get the LCD screen to light up.
- Screw on the sensors on to the right valve caps.
- Turn on the car and set the minimum and maximum pressures (28 PSI and 41 PSI based on a cold tire pressure of 35 PSI in my case) as well as the maximum temperature that the tires can take. I left that at 70 degrees Celsius.
- Done! Declare victory and have a beer.
I did the above and within a couple of minutes the tire pressures with each tire pressure showed up on the LCD screen:
Mine is in the cubby beneath the controls for the HVAC system. I can still see it, but it is in an out of the way place. But I won’t be looking at it while you are driving so that’s fine. Depending on where your 12v outlets are, you might get better or worse results from a visibility perspective. I checked the pressures and the information on the screen was more or less accurate (within 1 PSI) based on comparing what was on the screen with an air pressure gauge that I trust. The system is capable of generating alarms for low or high tire pressure, as well as high temperatures on a tire. Not to mention a low battery in the sensor. The beep it generates is hard to miss. Thus it covers all use cases to keep you safe. I like this use case because if an alert goes off you don’t need to whip out your smartphone and open an app to see what’s going on because everything that you need to see is right there.
Gripes? None really. And the price is right at $84.99 CDN on Amazon. If you’re a refugee from Nonda’s problematic tire monitoring system, or you want a easy to install system for your car that lacks tire pressure monitoring, then the Vesafe Tire Pressure Monitoring System is definitely worth a look.