We’re getting a new shed so we can de-clutter our garage. I’d like to leave our bikes out there for the winter, but in the past when I did that (previous house with shed) I always had to put new innertubes in the tires in the spring.
It regularly gets below zero F here. I’m thinking that my previous mistake might have been to leave the tires at full 65lb pressure. The tubes got cold and brittle and couldn’t handle the pressure.
Would reducing the tire pressure allow the tubes to survive what is essentially outdoors in a Northeast winter?
I’ve never had any problems with bike tires with bikes left in the stand-alone garage. It doesn’t often get much below zero here, and I usually have a lot less pressure in my balloon tires. I would reduce the pressure in the tires, as you suggested.
Our 2008 Buick that my wife drives to work has tire pressure sensors or some way of telling whether a tire has low pressure. A message came on the computer screen this last week that the right front tire pressure was low. I pumped a little air in the tire with a hand pump. Then the message was that the left front tire was now too low. I added a few pumps with the hand pump to the left tire, and it reversed sides again. It went back and forth like this until I finally got the tire pressure light to go out and the message to disappear. I kind of miss the old days of simply going around and kicking the tires.
I have not had that problem. Never left the bikes out all winter, but during the day it does occasionally stay near -20°F or so and it doesn’t seem to cause problems leaving the bike outside on the rack for 12 hours. Commuting year round I would think going from 60°F to <0°F would be even harsher due to the extremes. In fact I slightly over pressure my tires in winter due to the cold air shrinking and lowering the pressure.
And here I was thinking this thread would be about thick, thin or studded tires for winter.
I never had trouble in Wisconsin but it’s so tropical there, sometimes in winter it gets up to 32°F, shorts weather. However Continental, Nokian, and Schwalbe all make a variety of winter tires, and tubes, including studded tires.
A good number of years ago I worked as a lab supervisor for a rubber products manufacturing company in Tucson, AZ. One of the tests on the molded rubber products that I did was a cold test, where I subjected the test product to fairly extreme cold temperatures for extended periods of time. I remember that if you put dry ice in antifreeze, the antifreeze will become like syrup at around -100 degrees F. Since some of our materials were being used for aerospace applications, it was an important test. Needless to say, a lot of rubber products don’t do very well under cold temperatures. Sorry to say, I didn’t test any bike tires.
I of course would never leave my bikes in a shed in the first place, they’d get lonely. If they’re steel spray the frame tubes with Boeshied T-9.
All the bikes I’ve ever owned spent all the (Canadian) winters of their lives outside or in an unheated shed, and never did that harm either tires or inner tubes. I suppose that your present tires might be some kind of high-tech space-vinyl rather than rubber, and that this might make them unduly fragile in cold, but I’ve never heard of such a thing. It certainly wouldn’t hurt to deflate them, but I can’t see how that could harm them, either. Cold air is denser than warm air so the effect of freezing should be to decrease pressure, reducing the strain on the rubber.
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I’ve never heard of rubber actually degrading due to cold, but prairie people are well familiar with square tire season when the tires on the pickup freeze solid overnight with a flat on the bottom, and then keep that shape when you drive off in the morning. In suppose that if you try to ride on a frozen-solid bike tire, you might run the risk of cracking it because of reduced flexibility.
Beyond tread, the other major difference posessed by winter tires is that they’re made of softer rubber that stays flexible at lower temperatures. If you keep them on the car in summer, of course, they’re so soft that you’ll wear them off in no time.