I received the SensAiry today. I paid ₹7,500 for it on Wednesday 12 July and received a call from the company to confirm the order on the next day. The delivery sould have been a bit quicker, but it's fine. The product was well packaged and presented, and the short getting-started manual was to the point and very helpful, with a lot of diagrams to demonstrate how to get it installed. My only minor quibble would be that the font size was a touch too small and would be a pain to read for anyone with less than perfect vision; it was fine for me.
As for the product itself, it felt hefty and seems to have been built to last. I doubt that it can be done in by physical damage before its five years are up, though you'd have to be careful with them if you get your tyres separated from the rims for anything with them installed. It seems like it would be very easy for them to break during that procedure if the mechanic does not tread carefully around them. I particularly liked the high quality valves and metal caps it comes with.
I spoke to my tyre dealer (Mr. Sandip Rathi of Rathi Tyres in Siliguri, whose services I recommend) and he said he would get it installed, no problem. I went there after work and they were pretty well acquainted with how to install these things, having done it for a lot of cars that come with TPMS by default, but they'd never seen the SensAiry product before. Sandip ji has asked me to let him know how it works because he's interested in getting a set for his own car as well (though he turned down my suggestion that he should become a reseller for a product of this sort, saying that it's difficult enough to convince 99% of his customers to shell out for good tyres, leave alone equipment of this kind).
Installing them on the tyres is pretty straightforward if you follow the instructions. I'd already installed the app from the Play Store while at my office and I keep Bluetooth enabled throughout the day anyway (for my headset and smartwatch). Pairing the sensors to the phone by way of the app was easy, but here are a few tips for any of you who plan to buy them:
1. Don't add your vehicle in the app before you're ready to start pairing the sensors. If you move forward from the pairing screen, it is not obvious at all how to get back to it, if it can be done at all. I had to delete the vehicle and start over again after wasting a few minutes trying to figure out how to start the pairing process.
2. At no point do you need to go into your Bluetooth settings (except to enable it if it is switched off) to pair with the sensors. There is no need to even put your phone into scanning mode. The pairing screen within the app will handle all of it quite seamlessly for you. This part had the most potential to be extremely frustrating, but props to the product designers for doing a bang up job with it.
3. The manual suggests that you need to hold down the pairing button on each sensor for two seconds to get it to pair, but in my experience it took a little more than that, and quite a few attempts in some cases. The sensor for the spare wheel, in particular, had me almost on the verge of giving up before it finally paired. I even called the company for help but it was 07:30 PM and the phone went unanswered—which was just as well because I ended up being able to pair all the sensors without much drama in the end.
Like it says in the manual, pair each sensor with your phone and name them for the wheel you intend to install them in using the app, and then install each one in its rightful place. The app makes it very easy to switch between wheels within its interface when you put the spare tyre to use or do your biyearly rotation. Even if you mix up the wheels somehow, it's easy enough to figure out which one is which: just change the pressure in any of the tyres you're confused about and the app will tell you which wheel it is marked as.
Make sure you have your wheels balanced after you've had the sensors installed (even if, like me, you'd spent ₹700 doing it just a week before :( ). I ended up spending ₹1,030 on the whole endeavour, including a small tip for the cheerful, competent and enthusiastic mechanic.
Once everything is set up correctly, which took two hours in my case, the app will show you the pressure and temperature status for each of your tyres in a neat and very readable interface. It will also throw up push notifications to warn you if the pressure in any of your tyres is too low (or high, I would assume), without having to launch the app to check.
I'll have to confirm how well all of this works in the forthcoming weeks, and I'll be sure to let you know. I'll also check how much battery it consumes and whether it's something to be worried about. The pressure readings in the app are within the margin of error of 1 PSI, which is acceptable, I suppose. I had the pressure for each of the tyres in use set at 32 PSI and the spare unit at 35, but the app shows 33 PSI for one of the tyres in contact with the road and 34 for the one in the boot. The others are at 32, as expected, and as you can see in the attached screenshot.
So far, I'm satisfied with this purchase. It's exactly what I was looking for and is priced excellently for what it offers. If it performs as well as the company says it does, Tymtix has a winner on its hands in the SensAiry.
Last edited by aryayush : 17th July 2017 at 23:29.
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