AIRXWILLS Portable Battery-Powered Tire Inflator/Pump with Digital Gauge and Cut-off – Review

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If you’re like many serious cyclists you probably want to keep your tire pressure optimal, maybe even adjusting it for various conditions and of course, depending on your bike. Some people check tire pressure before every ride and others may be every few rides.

And like so many things having to do with cycling everyone has their own ideas about how much pressure is correct, everyone has their own ‘formula’ it seems.

So whether you are a serious cyclist or just a casual one (or just someone who needs to inflate tires once in a while – isn’t that everyone?) I have a great review and device for you!

The AIRXWILLS Portable Battery-Powered Tire Inflator/Pump with Digital Gauge and Cut-Off is what I am reviewing today.  The review title and the above link description is a mouthful I suppose, but I want to get all of those features in there and I don’t want to neglect anything 😉

First off; we know that even with a more expensive tire pump of all types sometimes the gauge can be off a bit or a lot, depending on the pump.

With that in mind (and momentarily skipping over the part of the review where I normally start at the beginning with the unboxing of the pump, charging, etc) I fully charged the pump and then immediately started pumping things up, of all sorts.  As I did so I checked the AIRXWILLS pump’s digital gauge’s reading on each thing that I was connecting it to – both before pumping the item up and after – and compared that to the readings on the gauges of known good pumps as well as the reading on a stand-alone good-quality pressure gauge that I know is accurate.

Across the board, the readings were consistently perfect between the AIRXWILLS Pump’s gauge and the pumps and gauge that I compared it to.  On a few tire pump gauges, it was maybe a bit hard to tell EXACTNESS down to the half-pound but on others (like my stand-alone bike tire gauge) it was easy to get the half-pound estimate and these very reliably displayed it perfectly in sync with the digital gauge of the AIRXWILLS pump.

I have compared the known good gauge readings on my other pumps and gauge with the AIRXWILL pump (and multiply re-checked) many times over the last few weeks using the tire pressure in every bike my wife and I own, and topping off and checking all tires on my Primary Bike Transport Vehicle (i.e. my car) as well as the large truck/SUV tires on our Secondary Bike Transport Vehicle (i.e. my wife’s car), the tractor, wagon, two hand trucks, rototiller, two snowblowers, kayak cart, and even blowing out dust from the CPU heat sink on a dirty computer. 

For the latter it actually works well because it is not a high pressure that would pack dust INTO a heat sink or other component – it’s a light pressure that is good for blowing the dust out, after which the item can be vacuumed.  Not exactly what the pump is made for but it does work.

I changed the preset for the bike mode to the PSI that I normally would pump my main road bike’s rear tire up to and was able to quickly stop the pump with the U button for my front tire – which I pump up with a slightly lesser amount of air than the back of course.  I assigned the motorcycle preset to my mountain bike tires.  There is also a car tire preset, a sports ball preset – any of which can be set to any pressure the pump is capable of and comes with a factory-set preset.

So accuracy-wise I am very, very impressed.  Over the long term, I can’t say what will happen but so far the gauge is spot-on.

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For larger jobs, the pump does get warm after a lot of inflation over a long time period, so I’m not sure about inflating a car tire from flat.  Likely you would need to let the pump cool every few minutes; I think when it comes to the battery power aspect; capacity-wise it would be fine but it seems as though you would need to pump some, then cool some, over and over until you got the tire pumped up.  Doable, but a bit time-consuming.  I did try some larger things but not a whole car tire, so I am interpolating from the time and heat generated during these tests with items of a larger capacity.

So back to the beginning – the pump is packed well in a nicely printed box showing a picture of the pump on the front in color.  It’s secure in cardboard dividers and all parts are bagged and held in place for shipping via the cardboard.

The pump itself feels substantial and has some nice heft to it.  There are some photos on its Amazon page showing it being carried in a bottle holder on a bike, with some extra bungies perhaps you might do this but it’s a bit small to stay in a bike bottle holder by itself and is a bit heavy (bike weight weenie-wise 😉 but is perfectly capable of being carried that way or strapped on or in a bag.

The pump feels like a quality piece of electronics instead of something cheap and crappy, like some of these seem to look like.  At the price, it is you would expect it to be relatively good instead of a very cheap model.  A very good price I think, but definitely not el-cheapo. 

It’s a nice color as shown in the pic, with black parts/controls and is easily seen if you set it down in the grass.  One end has a port for the USB charger while the other end has a small LED light and the place for the pump hose to screw into.  The hose seems to have standard threads like many hand pumps and such so I am guessing a hose from another pump would screw right into it if needed.

The hose is somewhat short but because the pump is easily held in the hand or set down while pumping I don’t notice that it is necessarily too short.  The hose, including the ends, is about fifteen and a half inches long (forty centimeters). 

The hose end itself has a standard Schrader valve attachment with a handle that snaps down to lock it, typical of many hand and small pumps.  So to use a Presta valve there is an included adapter – the type that you screw onto the Presta valve on your bike and then you snap the pump’s Schrader nozzle onto.  These adapters are common in case you lose it but what I do is keep it snapped into the nozzle when storing it as I am using the pump mostly for biking, otherwise you could store it in the bag or in a smaller bag with the other adapters inside the drawstring bag that comes with the pump perhaps.

There is also another type of adapter included – Dunlop/Woods valve adapter (probably not something you will use in North America, but popular elsewhere in the world) and stuff for blowing up sports balls and lots of other things, like swim rings.  There are also a few gaskets for the adapters.  Some of the adapters can be used as quick blowout tools for dust and other contaminants. 

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The description also says that this pump can be used to pump up MTB bike shocks. 

The pump can pump up anything to its maximum 150 PSI but for a large volume – like a car tire or an air mattress; it will take a long, long time and get pretty warm as I mentioned above.  The unit itself can get hot but also before that happens, the hose end can get hot; especially where the hose connects to the pump itself.

The light is a little single LED, it’s an okay addition I suppose.  It’s not very strong and there’s no way to turn it off or anything – it comes on when the pump is turned on and stays on as long as the pump power stays on (the whole thing shuts off after 30 seconds or so by itself).  I tried the LED light in a low-light environment and sure enough, it was just enough to see to attach the pump and pump up the tire.  Just enough.

Powering the pump is a built-in 2000mAh battery lithium-ion battery, it takes a few hours to fully charge but not long.  So far so good on the longevity of the battery, I have yet to recharge it, in fact, and I have been fully testing the pump for a few weeks.

It comes with a USB charger, one end plugs into the rear of the pump with a sturdy-looking standard sort of power plug and the USB end has an LED that shows when the pump is charged, which is nice.  The pump can be charged on pretty much anything – a computer, a wall adapter, or a cigarette lighter adapter.

There’s also a nice little satiny drawstring bag to put the pump in.  You can throw the other adapters in too but likely you’d want to stick them inside some other bag before just throwing them in loose in the bottom of the large drawstring bag.  I don’t need the rest of the adapters for the most part so I just pop the Presta adapter onto the end of the hose nozzle and lock it in place and stick the hose into the bag alongside the pump.  The problem is the hose does stick out a bit but you wouldn’t want to try and kink the hose to make it fit either, as that would most definitely damage the hose.  Maybe an imperfect storage solution but not any way around it without supplying an unnecessarily long bag.

The pump display can be configured to show various unit values – PSI, BAR, KPA, or Kg/cm.  The pump is rated to a maximum of 150 PSI maximum at 20 liters per minute.  High pressure but low volume.  And as I mentioned above it automatically shuts off at whatever you set the preset pressure to for the particular mode that you selected.

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The size of the pump is about 11.14 x 4.69 x 2.64 inches and the weight is around 623 g or 1.6 pounds.  

It also comes with a 1-year warranty so that’s good too.

Operation is easy.  There’s a power button, a plus and a minus to set your max pressure in whatever mode that you are in, and the U button which starts and stops the pump itself.  Pressing the power button moves through the modes for bike, motorcycle, car, basketball modes, and holding the power button down for a few seconds changes pressure units.  If you change the pressure max for any of the modes it will remember it for next time.

To sum up, then – my only complaints are small.  The little screw-on Presta valve converter should be replaced with a nozzle that is convertible for both common valve types or has a double with both.  And maybe a longer hose would be nice. Having to put the Presta valve adapter on is a few extra seconds of time but the hose length is nitpicking I suppose.

I guess maybe the fact that it gets a bit warm when pumping up anything with a large amount of volume might be a bit of a downside, depending on what you need it for, but I don’t believe that is what it is made for in general.  For bike use and topping off a car tire and such, this is not a factor at all.

Overall I am pretty ecstatic about the AIRXWILLS Portable Battery-Powered Tire Inflator/Pump with Digital Gauge and Cut-Off and its usefulness.

The long time between having to charge it is great and I likely will keep it by my bike stable mostly, for topping off tire pressures before riding.  The exactness of the gauge is a real super-plus.  I likely will continue to do some spot check comparisons with my other pumps and standalone gauge as well as the old-school pinch test as a backup.  But wow – accuracy of a pound or less is great.

The ease of having a small, self-contained unit that is easily portable is really useful for quick checks and precise pressure adjustments for biking, as well as good for topping off car tires anywhere.  Not to mention being able to take it with me easily where ever I go in my yard to use on my lawn tractor or a cart or other things.  And being able to throw it in the car and quickly deploy/use it for topping off my bike and others when meeting for a group ride is a real bonus.  There are a lot of applications for it. And it looks and feels heavy duty and durable.

Highly recommended at this point and I will make any review addendums if anything changes, but this AIRXWILLS Pump is so far pretty impressively useful to me.

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Marc M

I am a web developer and fitness geek, but I have a heck of a lot of differing interests.  Biking, the Internet, technology, movies, fitness, running and walking and hiking, science fiction, photography, graphics, WordPress, flying and aircrafts, pets and animals, history, and much more.  I like to stay very fit but I don’t mind sitting at my computer for work and play either.  I live in upstate New York (that’s far from New York City) in a rural area, yet close to a small city, with my beautiful awesome wife, a bunch of beloved cats and dogs and chickens in a very old multi-century house.

2 Comments:

  1. I like the pump very much but I can’t figure out how to turn off!! ????

  2. Hi Mike. There’s actually no way whatsoever to turn it off manually. After awhile if you don’t do anything with it it shuts off by itself, it doesn’t take too long.

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