Nitrogen in tires scam

However, it is almost time to switch our tires from winter air to summer air.

Cindy Hamilton

I use a special blend of gasses. One ingredient is nitrogen at 78%, the rest is proprietary and I cannot divulge it.

Ha. I recently bought some disinfectant wipes - and checked the active ingredients :

: 4 lines of several scary chemical compounds : 99.72 % other

John T.

Did anyone ever believe this?

I just switch the entire assembly. Studs are annoying in July.

"Other" is ad speak for water. The reality is most sanitizers, other than alcohol, work at pretty low concentrations. They are basically poison. A little dab will do you.

I'm pretty sure that in this case "other" is the material that the wiper is made from ... John T.

I recall a lot of past discussion.

The only plus I could think of was reduced oxidation but air and sunlight on the outside are most responsible for rubber degradation.

The question has come up on an auto group I frequent and there are a few that swear by it.

Jim Bakker and his flock swears silver solution cures Covid but that doesn't make it true.

Yeah, well, there are a few that swear copper bracelets cure arthritis. I've been on bike groups where people swear xyz snake oil improved their acceleration dramatically. This is particularly the case for aftermarket exhaust systems that increase the noise dramatically. The dyno says it ain't so. In fact some of the popular 'upgrades' dropped the Sportster's output by 2 or 3 horsepower.

Jim Baker swears that his Silver potion will cure the Crono virus also. Think it is also good for moles, colds and tight assholes.

My tires are self oxygen purge. The oxygen leaks out and each time I replace the air that leaks out it gives me a higher concentration of nitrogen.

Dry nitrogen DOES have advantages. Not that I'd pay $15 a tire for a nitrogen fill like some bandits were charging. Nitrogen definitely won't HURT anything.

I've used Brillcream a lot.

When you have a cold, put some under the nose and clears you right up.

Last new car I bought a few years ago, the dealer add-on sticker had a line item of $200 for a nitrogen fill.

The sales weasel said he couldn't negotiate on that- but I told him to knock a comparable BS item off the long list of stick-it-to-the-customer items on the dealer sticker or I was walking. He did.

My new car came with nitrogen-filled top of the line Michelins and I have to say, I've had minuscule pressure loss over three years.

Of course, I don't know if that's been due to the N, the high end tires, the valves or the really nice wheels!

I find slight disagreement with this source that says nitrogen does not permeate rubber as rapidly as oxygen does because nitrogen is a smaller molecule:

It apparently has slight advantages but is not worth a big price like the $200 your dealer wanted.

I have a new car and even after a year tire pressure was at the recommended value. Unfortunately I do not know where it started as dealers new cars have overinflated tires.

NTSB actually did a real pressure-loss test back in 2009. Surprisingly to me, they actually measured a sizable pressure drop in a pretty short time frame (90 days) of roughly 1 psi/mo from an initial pressure of about 60 psi (the specific tire was LT) whereas the average for 99% N2 fill was 0.74 psi/mo. The difference at 90 days was 56.3 psi vs 57.8 psi air vs N2.

HOWEVER, the longer-term 3-yr net effectiveness of N2-filled decreases even if the N2-filled tire is replenished w/ 99% N2 and the air-filled tire improves because over that time since O2 diffuses both ways, by the

All in all, the biggest real gain the study may have uncovered is that the N2 fill seemed to result in fewer tire failures in the corollary road testing in desert outside Phoenix that seemed to indicate higher O2 did have a deleterious effect on the tire composition. These also were long-duration tests, however, so it could possibly prove beneficial for those who keep same tires on their vehicle for long times.

All the talk about the H2 and O2 making water is a lot of hooey; air consists of only trace amounts of elemental H2 and what of it there is is already diatomic; there's no free H nor O floating around to combine to make water out of. What water is there is entrained in the atmosphere as water vapor already; some may condense out in cold weather while the tire is cold.

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Do you keep your tires at 60 psi? They would have had a more dramatic change/loss at 100 psi. Of course, even less dramatic at a more normal

They should repeat the same test in Maine or norther Michigan too.