The N2Revolution: is it actually just a lot of hot air?

Secondly, oxygen is corrosive. It reacts with the rims in tubeless wheels (the vast majority), whether they’re made of steel or aluminium, and this results in a fine powder of rust or aluminium oxide inside the tyre which also jams in the valve seat every time you check your tyre pressures – which further degrades the entire system and adds to the pressure seepage.

Thirdly, the N2Revolution system is purpose designed to overcome all these problems. Apart from taking the oxygen out of the air used to inflate your tyres, it also removes the moisture. Water and oxygen and heat combined significantly increase oxidation of the wheel rims an accelerate the aforementioned build-up of powder in the tyres. Most service stations give their air away free and hence pay no attention to maintaining their compressed air systems correctly, so that’s where the moisture will come from.

Changing over to nitrogen

Obviously, the best time to change is when you’re putting on all new tyres to avoid as much of the contamination of the system as possible. You should also give the inside of the rims a thorough clean.

Maintaining the system is also likely to be a problem as Nitroflators are not exactly all that common and topping up a tyre with air from a gas station will require you to purge the tyre and start all over again, or simply accept that it was all too hard to begin with and revert to an air-based inflation system.

Indeed, you’ll also need to carry your own tyre gauge from the point you convert to nitrogen as using the gas station tyre gauge is out of bounds too.

One of Gizmag’s writers spent many years testing cars and motorcycles for leading magazines and reports always carrying a tyre pressure gauge to ensure pressures were correct – he swears there is a vast discrepancy between gas station pressure gauges and their accuracy. Indeed, we know of one leading motorcycle journalist who broke a collarbone falling off a bike to find that he had over-inflated the tyres 15psi due to a faulty gauge at a service station.

The Return on Investment

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