Tire Deflator Comparison: Everything you wanted to know about airing down and more!! When you go off-roading, one of the first and most basic things you can do to improve traction is to air your tires down. Airing your tires down gives them a larger footprint. The contact patch between the tire and the surface of the road becomes larger giving better traction. This is a cheap and easy thing to do to improve your vehicles off-road capabilities and performance. Depending on what type of terrain you are driving on, you may want to air down to different pressures. If you are just going to be driving on a dirt road, airing down a little can add to the comfort of your ride. If you are driving on sand or snow however, you way want to air way down so as to give your vehicle the most flotation possible and keep on top of the snow and sand so you can keep moving.
Because of all the different possibilities of vehicles, vehicle weights, tire size's and types, we are not going to talk about what pressure is best for what type of terrain here. Instead, we are going to talk about how you can get your tires to that lower pressure in the fastest and easiest way so you can get on with enjoying your day on the trail!
We went out on the internet and went looking for different tire deflation devices. I actually didn't know there were so many out there! We found 10 different companies / devices:
Powertank: Monster Deflators
Sun Performance: Quick Air Deflators
Klune-V: Rapid Air Down Valve (RAD Valve)
Staun: Staun Deflators
Oyster Bay Tackle: Tire Buddy II
4 Crawler Off-Road: 4Air
Oasis: Trail Head Deflator
Teraflex: Tera Deflator
Currie Enterprises: EZ-Deflator
Equal Air US: Equal Air Deflator
.During the 4 tire test I also discovered a number of other interesting things about the deflators:
Tire Buddy II: When I used the Tire Buddy II to air down just one tire it took 9:24, but when we did all 4 tires the time increased greatly because we only had one. If we had 2 or even 4, the time would of course decrease. It turns out that as the deflator got colder, it also worked faster.
Sun Performance Quick Air Deflators and Teraflex Deflators: These two deflators look almost identical. When we got done with the testing, again we found that although they looked almost identical, they did not take the same time to air down your tires. Look at the times for the two tests in the charts above and you find that the Sun Performance Quick Air Deflators beat the Teraflex Deflators by quite a bit of time. For pictures of the two deflators side by side click HERE. Can you tell which one is which? 4-Crawler Off-Road 4 Air: My first impression when looking at the 4 Air was that it was going to be difficult to set up and put away. I was very pleased to find that this was not the case. It set up quickly and was equally quick to store. I was also quite impressed at how fast it was able to inflate all the tires, with a time of 2:57 compared to 7:39 if I just used my air hose and chuck.
Oasis Trail Head Deflators: These are great since you can just stop, put them onto the tires and then get right back on the trail. They were very light and came in a neat little bag with a lot of extras such as the laminated instructions and information card, low pressure tire gauge, and deflation slide scale.
Equal Air: First off I was surprised at how small the box was, and that after I used it I was actually able to get it all to fit back in and close the lid. At 9.5 inches wide by 6.5 inches deep by 3 inches thick, it was small enough to be able to tuck it behind the seat. The valve for deflating the tires was quite similar to the Currie EZ-Deflator, simple, quick and easy to use. The included low pressure gauge was easy to read and a great bonus.
Staun Tire Deflators: These were the most sensitive of the group. Very small adjustments could be made to get them just where you wanted them. They were also the only automatic deflators that had a manual start, a great feature when you want to fine tune things.
Currie EZ-Deflator: At first glance, it looks complicated but once you do it once it is really easy and very fast. I liked the build in gauge so you could deflate to any pressure depending on what you wanted to do, you were not preset to a specific pressure. This was one that most people wanted to pick up and play with.
Powertank Monster Deflators: I must admit I was a little nervous about these guys. I was going to have to drill holes in my rims and tap the deflators into them. There was no going back! Once I got the first set installed, I was very happy to find that the install was way easier than I thought it was going to be. During the test when I wanted to let air out of the tires they were right there ready to go, and boy do they go! With a single tire time of 27 seconds, your biggest worry is not letting too much air out! With the included Monster Chuck, putting the air back in has never been faster! Using the Monster Chuck and my compressor, I was able to air one tire from 10psi to 34 psi in just 31 seconds. I was able to do all 4 tires in just 2:13, compared to 7:39 with the standard tire chuck.
Klune-V Rapid Air Down (RAD) Valves: These deflators were quite versatile. You can install them on rims by replacing your existing valve stems, or drill new holes and run them as a second set of valve stems. They were quite fast at letting the air out, and the air cap acts as a safer lock to make sure that the air release cannot come loose when you don't want it to.
I had a lot of people ask me how a normal valve core tool compared to all the others when I first put this comparison up, so I ran a time test on a simple valve core tool also:
Time to deflate one tire from 34 psi to 10 psi: (minutes:seconds)
1:41
Time to deflate all four tires from 34 psi to 10 psi: (minutes:seconds)
6:20
Overall Results:
Fastest overall tire deflator: Powertank Monster Valves
Fastest installed tire deflator: Powertank Monster Valves
Fastest non-installed tire deflator: Oasis Trail Head Deflators
Fastest automatic tire deflator: Oasis Trail Head Deflators
I have also put together this price list for each of the deflators.
Tire Inflator Comparision
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