An air compressors and tire inflator for a car becomes necessary if you like doing everything all by yourself and let’s accept that nowadays repair shops charge a heck lot of money even for tire puncture repairs. So, repairing small things by yourself is good even for your pockets.
Air compressors and tire inflator – what is the difference?
As such, there is not much difference between the two as both serve the same function. But they come in different form factors and work a bit differently. So, we will explore the differences and then suggest you the best.
Air compressor
Air compressors are generally larger devices that have a tank to store air. When we supply power to this machine, it starts a pump and compresses air to store it in the tank.
It is larger than tire inflators and it is the same inflating device that you see in shops as these are heavy duty and take less time to inflate.it can also provide high air pressure in PSI so is good for inflating bicycle tires where the pressure needed is 90-120 PSI.
These traditional air inflators are heavier due to the built-in tank and have metal construction. Top models have oil lubrication to drive the pump for compressing air and these oil-lubricated air compressors are the quietest among air compressors.
Air compressors have various other functions too like they are used to spray paint cars or small air compressors are used in nail guns.
The two major downsides of air compressors that made them useful only in repair shops are their power input necessity and large size paired with heavyweight. By power input, I meant it needs wall socket voltage. But that has the advantage of filling us tires within seconds.
Their larger size and heavyweight make them unsuitable for normal home-usage. They are quite expensive too. For their large size and heavyweight, you cannot always carry them in your car.
Tire inflators
Tire inflators are used for the same purpose of filling up air in tires but these are for individual use and are compact. People can easily store it even in cars and use it whenever necessary.
There is a heck of a lot of advantages of tire inflators over the air compressor system. Firstly, their compact size and lightweight make it ideal to carry in your car to be used in any place. Secondly, these can operate with a car’s 12V power socket so you don’t need a wall outlet like the air compressor.
Tire inflators don’t have a built-in tank to store air like the air compressor. Instead, these pump air directly to the tire when you power them. So, it takes significantly more time to inflate tires but makes it lighter.
Tire inflators come in various shapes and sizes. But it is differentiated mainly into two forms:
Automated tire inflators
These have sub-variants but the main identifying criteria of automated tire inflators is that they need a power source to fill the air. These are a bit more expensive than the manual form which we will talk about next.
Here we can see two sub-variants- one that uses the car’s 12V charging socket and another that has a battery in it and works with that.
12V tire inflators
These are relatively larger than the battery-operated ones and are faster in filling the air. It comes from leading manufacturers like Michelin and Bergmann Typhoon. Bergmann has cheaper tire inflators which start at just below rs 2,000. Michelin is costlier at over 3.9k
Battery operated
These are extremely compact and lightweight tire inflators and are a newer invention. Mi portable tire inflators are one example. These are so compact that they can even be carried in pockets.
The con is that these take a lot of time in filling the air and the charge hold is not much. For example, the Mi portable inflator can’t even fill up 4 tires of a car with a single charge.
Manual tire inflators
As the name suggests, this kind of tire inflator demands manual force or effort to fill up air in tires. These are also compact and lightweight and are the cheapest among all tire inflators. Their low price attracts a lot of customers and a lot of people prefer to do a bit of manual hassle than pay more.
These have a meter where your tire pressure will be shown and it is operated by foot. There is a lever that needs to be pressed by foot to let atmospheric air be pressurized into the tires. Modern-day manual tire inflators are not so hard as the old ones and thankfully we need to apply much less pressure so it is not much problematic.
That was all regarding air compressors and tire inflators for cars. You can choose according to your use, for example, if you want to use it for yourself then go for automated tire inflators for cars but if you own a repair shop then buy an air compressor for cars.
