Tymate TM7 TPMS Tested on a Horse Trailer | Peace of Mind While Towing

Do you want the ability to monitor your classic car or trailer's tire pressure in real time while traveling down the highway? Then this video is for you. Obsession. Brought to you by Waffle Square. The TimeMate TM7 TPS monitoring system was intended for older vehicles that don't come standard with a TPMS monitor like most modern vehicles do. But I'm going to show you how to use it to monitor your trailer's tires to avoid a disaster on the roadway. And as you can tell by this decal on the back of our horse trailer, we are hauling precious cargo. Now, this unit has an alarm that will sound if you get a rapid deflation of one of your tires or if they even fall 15% below your preferred PSI. But first, let's take a look and see what comes in the package. All right, so the first thing I notice when I open up the package is look how big these valve stem covers are. Here's your typical one that's just a little plastic stem. So there is quite a bit of circuitry going on there. If I turn this way, you can see we have the actual stem engagement going on right there in the center. So that is going to actually push and release air pressure onto this unit so it can sense. That makes sense. Another thing that I noticed is you have left front, left rear, right front, right rear. So definitely put them in order. And then our screen here is, we have about, what, about two inch by two inch. And then the screen is much smaller than that, a little more than maybe an inch and a half or so squared. There are three buttons up top. You got a positive, negative, and set. They're really, really small. So you definitely are going to want to make those sorts of settings before you put the car in drive. And then the back is just your standard 12 volt cigarette lighter adapter. Now, below this, we have the wrench that these stem connectors go into here. It sits right in there and you can use that to tighten them to the proper specification. And then right below that, we have this bag with some O-rings, these brass colored nuts, and the wrench. So in reading the manual, these nuts right here are meant if you are worried about your stems being stolen. So what you would do is put these on first, then put the stem on, take the included wrench, and back this nut on to make a really tight fit that won't come loose. Here out in the country, we are not worried about our stems being stolen, so I'm not going to bother with this step. The first step is to go around and set the proper PSI in all your tires ahead of time. This is called the reference setting. The monitor up front will alert if the tire pressure goes 25% above or 15% below the reference pressure. That's why you want to get it as accurate as possible in the beginning. So this one was a little low. We raised it up a bit and all the tires are 70 PSI within half a PSI based on my little gauge here. All right, next thing to do is supply power to the receiver. Since we're working on a trailer here and I don't know if it's going to reach all the way to the truck, I have my little homemade power supply here that I'm supplying power. When you first turn it on, all of these will be zero. I was messing around with it earlier before I realized how badly deflated my tires were, and it's still registering those. But now that we have the power on, we can go around to each tire and put on these little transmitters. But don't worry if you don't have such a thing. There is a USB-C port right here. You could plug it in and use any battery adapter that you typically charge your phone with, which is just so cool. All right, this is the right front tire. So we have the RF for right front transmitter. Now, one thing I noticed is you need to put these on really fast because you're going to lose in my testing like a pound and a half almost of PSI. Let's see if we can do it really quick. Hear that? All right. Outstanding. So we got all of them on without losing much more than about a half a PSI. So the key is to put them on fast. Now, if you notice, these two here where we're at are in the shade, and they're 55 and 57. And then over here, the two on the left side are in full sun, and you can see the temperature of those is quite a bit higher. So we know that's working as well. Now, the next test is going to be to take it and go up to the truck and test it. So I came back here to a dark corner of our garage so you could actually see the different brightness settings. So this middle button, the set button, you can go through the four different settings. This is the brightest. One click takes you down to the lowest. Then there's two in between and then the brightest. And that's a really nice feature so you can turn down the brightness at night when you're trying to look out the window and make sure you're not hitting any deer. So here comes the big test. The distance from the back tire all the way up to the dashboard is more than 25 foot tape measure. It is, in fact, six feet more. So can this receiver receive at 31 feet away? All right, let's start our car. Ding dong, ding dong. Here's the Farin wireless CarPlay adapter we just reviewed. Kicking on without issue. Go ahead and mute that for now. All right, here is our cigarette lighter adapter. Now, one thing that is super cool, if you normally use your cigarette lighter adapter to charge your phone or electronic devices like we have this one here, on the side of our TimeMate receiver we have USB-C and USB. So you won't lose that functionality, which is just really cool. All right, in we go. Now we should see these temperatures obviously go up if we're receiving data. And it doesn't look like right now we're receiving anything because there's no way those tires have dropped down from what they were like 80 degrees just a few minutes ago. Well, let's put it into gear, drive around a little, and see if it starts picking it up intermittently. Now it's pretty hot in the car right now, so I'm going to turn the AC on. But I don't want to roll the windows down because I want to get a true test of what it would be like on the highway. All right, I drove around the block and at no time did we get an update on any of the temperatures. So I don't think we are receiving any signals. Now all is not lost. TimeMate is well aware of the limitations of their receiver, especially for bigger vehicles or vehicles with trailers. So they make this repeater. And inside we have the directions and we have the repeater that needs to be wired into the trailer's power. And this little antenna here will take the signal from back there and amplify it, casting it here to the truck. So inside the tack room of our trailer we have this wiring diagram. Now it's been converted to a seven pin, but we can still see that the red wire is the auxiliary hot wire. Meaning when it's plugged into the truck, that red wire is always a source of power. That's the one we want. So once I knew the red wire was the one we were after, as you can see in this picture, I cut back the insulation around the entire trailer bundle. I'll clean that up here in a little bit. I found the red wire, which was not in use. I used heat shrink connectors that you first crimp and then take a heat gun and it shrinks them down and activates the glue. And once that was done, I took a grinding wheel and cleared off some of the rust and scale to get fresh metal. Then I crimped on and heat shrank a circular connector and put a rivet through it. So we won't have to worry about a metal screw possibly coming loose. I then quickly came in here and turned the key two times to get power going back to the trailer hitch. I plugged in the cable and as you can see here, the repeater came on. So now we are ready to do a full test. So let's first start the car and let's plug our unit in. It's going through its normal warm-up process here. Now you can see the repeater icon came on all on its own. If yours doesn't do that, you press and hold the center set button for three seconds and it will begin to search for it. Now I can tell already that we are in business. Look at this. The right side or passenger side of the trailer is in the shade again and those temperatures correspond to that 55 degrees, which is what it is outside. Then we go to the left side or the driver's side in our case here America and you can see that the stems are registering 82 and 75 degrees. So we know for a fact that we are picking up the signal. That is fantastic. Now the manual for the repeater was very poorly written, but it does stress that you should try to keep the antenna, the actual unit that's transmitting, away from metal. I think it affects the signal and that is why I chose to mount it underneath on the floorboards. Now there are a few more things that I think you should be aware of. The repeater has a tiny 2 amp inline fuse, so if you ever have any issues with it not transmitting, I would open up and check that fuse. The transmitters each have a small CR1632 battery in them, which we'll eventually need replacing. So the other side of the included tool is meant for opening them. You also get the spare o-rings if those ever deteriorate. Also it appears you can store a spare battery inside of the tool so you can change one on the road to avoid hearing this alarm. So that's what the alarm sounds like if you take one of the monitors off. And finally the receiver is selectable for less than four transmitters, meaning let's say you have a trailer with a single axle. You could set the transmitter to only monitor the two wheels and the spare tire. Now you may have noticed earlier in the video that this system is already paying off because we have a tire here at the right rear that has a slow leak and we'll need to get that fixed before our next trip with Izzy. So if you found this video helpful you please give it a thumbs up. It's super helpful to the channel. Also please consider subscribing. I work really hard to put out good quality content like this. We also have an ongoing series going on with our Land Rover and it's very helpful to the channel. Now I'd like to thank Tim8 for sending me out this unit for free for my independent review. Full disclosure I did pay with my own money for the repeater. I'm going to put a link to this unit in the description below so you click on the more and it opens up the entire description for this video. That is a link provided to me by Tim8 so check that out if you want to see the system. This is currently about $36 which I think is a great value. Until next time, thank you for watching.