When You Put Air In Your Tyres, Check Your Spare

If you have a car or drive one, you’re probably (hopefully) regularly checking your tyre pressure. Under-inflated tyres can be a huge problem, doing everything from causing an accident, to speeding up wear and tear on your tyres, to wasting gas. In other words, you’re going to want to keep them properly inflated. And while you’ve got the tyre gauge out, you should also check the pressure on your spare tyre.

Over on Reddit’s LifeProTips page, original poster MANDOBURGER2 suggested putting some air in your spare when you’re putting air in your other tyres, writing: “Some spare tyres will lose air over time and you never know when you’ll need to use it.” While that’s true about spare tyres losing air without us noticing it, we should clarify that the tip here is to check your spare’s pressure when checking your other tyres—only adding air if the tyre needs it.

Plus, as another poster in the thread points out, the spare tyre’s recommended pressure is usually different than the regular-sized tyre’s recommended pressure. Check your owner’s manual to find out the correct PSI (pounds per square inch) for both your regular and spare tyres. Typically, regular tyres have a recommended PSI of 30 to 35, while most spares have a recommended PSI of around 60. But again, check to see what your specific model requires in order to avoid over- or under-inflating any of the tyres. It may end up that you have a full-size spare, in which case there wouldn’t be a difference in PSI.

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And to back up a little bit more, you should probably also check to see if you have a spare tyre at all. Spare tyres don’t always come standard with some newer cars, so this is something you should look into before you’re stranded on the side of the road.