Hi there. For the past week we were staying at a state park without Wi-Fi, using our cellular modem. So I took a break from doing blog posts to preserve bandwidth, since it was a new service, and we didn’t know how fast we’d go through it. It turned out that we used about half of the capacity if we were using it full-time, and most of the time we expect to have campground Wi-Fi, so we don’t need to be so careful with it. Which is good.

Anyway, I’ve got a bunch of topics and pictures to share, so you can look forward to daily posts for a while.

As you might expect, tires are rather important with an RV. So to help keep an eye on them, we purchased a tire pressure monitoring system, or TPMS. It has sensors on each valve stem, plus a signal repeater, and a display in the cockpit.

Here’s a flow-through tire pressure sensor for a front tire; flow-through means it has a normal cap for filling, and the air can go through the sensor, making it more convenient:

Another sensor, for an inner rear tire; the number “5” is a sticker to identify the placement:

A sensor for an outer rear tire:

Part of the system is that it can monitor the truck tires too. Our truck has its own built-in TPMS, but we can’t see that when towing the truck behind the coach, and it’s important to watch them too, since our coach could drag the truck with flat tires without noticing. The pressure sensors for the truck are cap style, i.e. they replace the valve cap, and have to be removed to top up the air:

Since our coach and truck totals 60 feet front to back, the TPMS comes with a repeater unit, to help the sensor signals from the truck tires reach the front of the coach:

They recommended mounting the repeater in the chassis bay at the back of the coach:

So I hooked it up to 12V connectors there; the thin red and black wires:

The repeater is mounted to a wall in the bay:

Here’s the display unit in the cockpit; it cycles through each of the tires, blinking each in turn, and showing the current temperature and pressure of each tire. If one gets too hot, or the pressure drops, it sounds an alarm:

I have it on the dash where I can see it: