Please, anyone on this site who reads this, please don't pay money for Nitrogen. Take that money and buy a good tire gauge and monitor your regular 78% Nitrogen regular ol air.
Sincerely your resident tire engineer.
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I thought the nitrogen fill was to preserve alloy rims from internal corrosion. Seems like all the cars my friends have bought with alloys the rims always leak. My mom has used N2 in her Equinox alloys and they still don't leak. While in my limited perspective steel rims never start leaking with air and age the same way. I wouldn't pay for nitrogen but I'm also happy with steel.
Here is a good article on Nitrogen inflation. Summary: If it's free...go for it. :)
I've never heard that theory. Most cases of leaky alloy wheels I've seen is corrosion over time of the wheels where the tire bead is seated on the wheel. A good tire installer will alert the customer to any corrosion and clean it off and/or seal it before installing new tires. If you're getting tires at a budget tire dealer, they may be mounting tires on wheels with bad corrosion and not telling you. In that case, you will eventually get slow leakage at the tire bead.
Actually I think we're on the same page. Normal air fill has water vapor leading to the bead seal corrosion that leads to the leaking. Religiously Nitrogen fill and there's no water vapor to cause the corrosion.
As an update, with my wheel (Maxxim Maze) and tire (185/55r15 Ecopia @ 45psi) combo, my average fuel economy today came out to be somewhere in the mid-thirties today. It was a lot of town driving, though. I will see what it ends up looking like when I take a drive up to the dealership over the weekend, as that will be mostly highway. I think I ended up averaging in the mid-forties last time. I just enabled cruise control, as well, so that should help.
Will be interesting to see the results.
Are you multiplying your distance traveled by 1.025 because of the slightly taller tires?
Also keep in mind... Nothing has less rolling resistance than a set of worn out low rolling resistance tires. So if you went from worn out Enasaves to brand new Ecopias, it's possible you would not see a change (or possibly a slight decline) in your fuel mileage.
I'm running on very worn Ecopias at the moment (and getting my best fuel economy numbers ever). When my new tires go on within the next month, I expect to take a little bit of an economy hit.