Looking forward to getting on the road and making the most out of your caravan? Caravan towing tyre pressure is an important factor on these trips as it can affect your safety, fuel economy, tyre wear and tyre damage. Admit it, you often overlook caravan tyres and you don’t check regularly, right? But don’t worry, we’re here to help you manage that be a better caravan owner.
What to look for in your Caravan
If you have “new caravan” on the compliance plate, it should have the cold tyre pressure and this is a good starting point. But many people have older caravans and they’ve already changed tyres. Also, they might have also added some things to the van that have increased its weight.
The first thing to do is to look at your tyres on your caravan and the code of the wall of the tyre.
It will look something like this: 205 / 65 R 15 94 H
- 205 = Tread Width of the tyre in mm so 205mm wide.
- 65 = Tyre wall height so it is 65% of the width of the tread.
- R = Tyre construction so in this case it is Radial
- 15 = Rim diameter so 15”
- 94 = The load rating see table below
- H = Speed rating of the tyre
What we mainly want to look at is the Load Rating of the tyre. The load rating table can be from 60kgs to 1900kgs load per tyre.
From the table above, you can see that 94 = 670kgs maximum load for this tyre. We never want to go over 90% of this weight. So, for a single axel van, you will have 670kgs x 2 Tyres and that would be 1340kgs. You do not want to go above 90% of this though, so the true maximum load for these two tyres is 1251kgs.
The next thing we need is the maximum pressure of the tyres. You can find this on the tyre somewhere marked as “Maximum Pressure 60PSI”.
We will also need the ATM (Aggregate Trailer Mass) of the caravan. This is the total weight of the caravan, including cargo or payload. Getting an accurate reading of this can be difficult, but your best bet is to load the caravan up and get the weight reading from a weigh bridge.
To get the correct tyre pressure, you need some math. Here is an example:
- 1200Kgs ATM on single axel caravan.
- Maximum Pressure / Maximum load weight from table = A1
- A1 x (ATM / per Tyre so single axel it will be half ATM or quarter for twin axel) = Tyre Pressure
- So from the numbers above, we will do the example for a single axel caravan.
- 60 / 670 = 0.08955
- .08955 x (1200 (ATM) / 2 (Single Axel, Would be 4 for tandem) ) = 53.7PSI
- So the correct tyre pressure should be 54PSI.
This tyre pressure is when the tyre is warm, and when it’s colder, tyre pressure should be around 4PSI less. This is a rough rule of thumb though. If you inflate your tyres to 50PSI when they are cold, you should be sitting around 54PSI after 30mins or so of highway driving. Also, remember as you travel around Australia, the temperature will change a lot, and you will need to take this into account.
Note that this guides is for general road/highway driving only. If you are driving off road, we’ll cover that in another post.
Conclusion
We recommend a Tyre Pressure monitoring system (TPMS) to monitor your tyre pressures and will warn you if anything goes wrong. The best thing is that it also checks tyre temperature so you’ll get a better reading of your caravan tyres.
See our range of TPMS Systems here.