Making sure you have your tire pressures at their recommended levels is not only important for your safety, it also helps you save on fuel and it reduces the wear and tare of your tire rubber.
So unless you check your tires regularly, you may not know if you have a slow puncher, or even a flat tire, until it’s too late. By having a gadget that
monitors and informs you of the status of your tire pressures, it can be super handy and also be potentially life saving.
The Gocomma Ｍ20 Solar Energy Tire Pressure Monitor from GearBest.com is such a gadget that monitors your tire pressures in real-time and reports them on display console that you place inside your car.
Many more modern cars are coming with tire pressure sensors and low pressure alerts as standard these day. But my problem with many of these systems is that some just don’t display the actual live pressure of each tire. You usually have to drop over 10 psi before your car begins to report it. Being able to see the pressure dropping much earlier can extend the life of your tire, and in extreme conditions it could help with the performance of your vehicle when you need it the most.
The Gocomma Ｍ20 is a tidy little device that simply attaches to your windscreen, for easy viewing of its LCD display of all four wheel pressures and their temperatures. It conveniently self charges itself by its bank of external facing solar cells, whilst a micro USB port can be used to power it should you run out of sun. Four pre-paired tire caps are screwed on to each tire valve, and once they are connected each of their pressures and temperature readings are sent, in real-time, directly to the display console.
Once the display console has had its initial charge via its USB port for a few hours, you peel-off the two 3M transfers on the back of the console and attached it to a convenient location on your windscreen. I chose to mount the Gocomma Ｍ20 just behind my rear view mirror on the drivers side. From this position I was able to glance at its colourful display of data.
The LCD display console shows each of the four wheel’s pressures and temperatures, either in bar or psi, fahrenheit or celsius. As soon as pressure is lost this will show on the display console, with drastic rise or fall in these measurements sounding an audible alert. If one of the sensors are lost in transit or disconnected, this is also displayed on the console, along with an alarming audio alert.
Each tire sensor cap is simply screwed onto the valve of the tire. To prevent the theft of each sensor cap, a set of nuts for each cap is supplied that screws on to the value and is tightened back up with the supplied spanner to prevent their removal. This security is a nice addition, yet without the display console to connect to they are pretty useless on their own if anyone is thinking of stealing them. Each sensor battery is stated to last between 1-2 years, and the battery can be easily removed from each cap with the use of the supplied battery removal tool.
Thanks to the act of physics, pressures and temperatures rise whilst you wheels are in motion, so I was soon alerted with an audible warning of my recommended rear 44 psi pressures going over the default 47 psi threshold. Although this was reassuring to see the system working as intended, as a first time experience it was pretty alarming. Luckily the low and high alerts of pressure and temperature thresholds can be altered on the display console via its three function buttons.
During my test of the Gocomma Ｍ20 I noticed I had a slow puncher in my rear left tire. It was something I was already aware of, thanks to the built-in tire pressure system of my Volkswagen Golf, but I wasn’t aware of the severity of the pressure drop until I could see it reduce each day on the display console of the Gocomma Ｍ20.
Currently retailing for £35.65 ($45.99 US) from GearBest.com the Gocomma Ｍ20 is a relatively cheap car gadget that can prove to be highly valuable in certain circumstances. Be it saving fuel, prolonging the life of your tire, to even saving your life. I loved the fact that it can be solar charged, meaning there’s no nasty cables finding its way around your windscreen towards a powered USB port. The Gocomma Ｍ20 is one handy gadget that you just don’t think you need in your vehicle until you have it, even if your own vehicle already has a tire pressure checking system.
