My previous pick for an electric mini pump had one fatal flaw, which was that it didn't have a pressure gauge and auto-shutoff. Those were in the $70-90 range, but then I found the GPUTEK. Contrary to its name, it doesn't have a GPU in it, but it's a small mini pump that has a gauge. It has 3 buttons, a power button (push once to turn it on, hold it down to turn it off), a + button (increase pressure) a minus button (decrease pressure, double-tap to switch between PSI and BAR). It comes with a pin to pump up basketballs or soccer balls, a hose, and 2 screw heads, one for Presta (red) and one for Schraeder (white). The hose is in case you have a plastic valve stem inner tube, so you would screw the hose into the pump and one of the heads into the pump instead, so that the pump head doesn't overheat the valve stem and melt it!
The claimed weight is 104g, which is very believable and light enough for touring use, even if you're a weight weenie. The weight of one of these pumps along with a Energizer slim powerbank will weigh less than a regular Topeak Road Morph pump. The slim powerbank doubles as a battery backup for both the pump (it's good for 2 pumps from empty) and your phone when touring, so it serves a useful function even if you never use the pump.
To use it, you first turn it on, and then use the plus and minus button to adjust to your preferred pressure in 1psi increments. This requires some patience because if you accidentally push too often the device thinks it's a double tap and switches units instead. Then you double-tap the power button to start pumping. You can also double-tap the power button to the to turn it off. Of course, the pump shuts off when it detects the correct pressure, so I never turn it off manually, allowing it to detect the pressure before shutting down. The pump is noisy compared with my luxury Silca Super Pista, but I never even considered bringing that along on tour. The way pumps work, you can either have a big compressor that's quiet and moves slowly, or you can have a small compressor that spins fast and hence makes a very loud noise. Guess what? On tour, small and light is a premium and so you put up with the noise.
All through this year's tour, we used it to top up the bike tires every other day. In the past I never bothered doing this, but this year we kept the tandem's tire pressure on the low side as recommended by the Rene Herse tire pressure calculator, and when you do that you really should top up the tire every couple of days, especially with the temperature variation and altitude changes. I probably would never bother if I had a manual pump, but with this one it was easy so I just did it. By being more diligent than usual, the pump also detected a slow leak which I verified with a bucket of water after the tour was over. (It turned out to be a manufacturing defect in a TPU tube)
I'm slowly replacing all other pumps in the house with this one. It's cost effective, light, and so far very reliable.
No comments:
Post a Comment