TPMS - some trivia questions about how they work / go bad

TPMS - some trivia questions about how they work / go bad

Read more

I have a honda civic with 145K miles on it. Just got a new set of 4 tires put on at Costco.

The yellow tire light with ! on dash comes on and a message about TPMS comes up on the display.

Googling, people talk of a TPMS reset in the menus - it's not there. Others talk of a TPMS reset button at lower part of dash. Not there. I check the pressure on the tires and they are all ok / 32 on my guage.

Bring it back to Costco and they say they have to use a tool to reset them. The tech goes to each tire with 2 boxes and what I think is a cable to connect to the connector under the dash.

3 of the tires, the 2 boxes displays flash green. 1 tire doesn't.

He says the sensor on that tire likely needs to be replaced.

The display at the register talks about the batteries lasting about 7 years. So I am ahead of the game there.

But I explained as a costco fan, please speak freely...i didn't have the message before the tire change.

He explained that the sensors are usually asleep till they have a pressure change. That sensor might have used its remaining power to send the low pressure message when the tire was getting changed. If they had damaged the sensor, there'd be air leaking also.

OK, but afterwards, I thought - aren't the sensors beaconing every once in a while for the car to detect and know they are working? Is the 'low pressure' message that much more battery intensive than 'I'm alive' message? I guess too - there's some amount of time between taking the old tire off, it seeing low pressure and then new tire going on. So it's signalling for 10 - 20 minutes and running down the battery?

Given all that, the battery likely IS dead. Do you bother replacing it? It's $70 for the 1? And as he joked - the others are likely going to die soon after.... do all at once. On a 10 year old car, I can deal with a TPMS message (I check the tire pressure once in a while anyway).

Goto foxwell to know more.

Originally Posted by

Your Saab is a great example of what TPMS were designed to be. A nice added safety feature that didn't require much thought from the owner. Somehow 10 years later, it has become a system that is way more complicated than it needs to be.

A basic TPMS should be simple. If one tire has low psi, the dash light comes on. That's all the system has to do. I don't even see the need for 4 different codes? Some cars will give you a psi reading for each individual tire on the car, but this system is not that complicated. All the system needs to do is record four working sensors & give a warning for low psi in any given tire.

It's nice to know a better system is out there. The Mirage system appears to be pretty lame. My hope is that when my sensors start to die, I will be able to replace all four sensors with ones that can be cloned or come with a matching set of sensors. Until that day comes, I will just drive with the dash light on when using my snow tires. Like mentioned already, you can think of the dash light as telling you that you are in snow tire driving mode!

For more information, please visit TPMS Sensor Tool.