Tire pressure alarm comes on and then clears

Happened to me on both cars this past month. Tires normally lose pressure over time, and cold weather drops the pressure even more. Rather than finding the one tire that triggered the light, you should first top off all of the tires. If you notice that one is particularly low, there may be a problem. More likely is just time and the cold weather.

I carry a tire pressure gauge in the glove compartment just for your situation. The TPMS light says something is wrong, the tire pressure gauge says which tire is low.

 

i suspect you are borderline and cold effects them, then driving reverses. the only way to find out which tire is with a tire gauge, (or maybe scan gauge) which you should be using on a regular basis, not waiting for the idiot light.

 

A 12 plug-in, the tpms is five or six, time to replace, talk to a tire jobber, 65$ each, if yer lucky, or buy the tool to electronically register the serial numbers 125$ ish and the tpms 22-32$ ish, google the tpms sensors for Toyota, then get a jobber to change the tpms, and you have the tool to code them.

 

Get a gauge and check them ALL.
This time of year it is likely that more than one needs some air added.

 

Love it.

 

If you already have a laptop and Techstream software for doing other maintenance on the car, you don't need anything else special to register new TPMS senders.

Techstream can also show you the pressure, temperature, and battery health at each sender, so you can tell the difference between a code because of low pressure and one because a sender's battery is depleted, and which one.

But still, the best first reaction to a TPMS light is just to check and top off the air in all tires. It's generally even faster than hauling out the laptop with Techstream. There's always time for that if putting air in the tires didn't make the light go away. Note: give it a while; my TPMS light tends to go out sometime during the following day after I add air.

If you do have a low battery in one sender, it's kind of up to you and your budget whether you want to replace all of them proactively, or just that one. While they are statistically expected to wear out around the same time, that doesn't guarantee it happens for you in practice. (On my last car, the space between my first and second wheel bearing replacements was 50k miles, and I never had to replace the remaining two at all in the time I had the car.) If your neighborhood tire place discounts the price for doing all at once, great, but you may find they just price it per wheel. Around here they ask about $12 to dismount/remount one tire.

-Chap

 

For some people, the obvious isn't always.