If you’re going to use car battery regularly, consider replacing it with a high amp hour deep cycle marine battery. A typical car battery is not designed to take discharge below 80% well, and electric motors are notorious amp hour hogs.
I have one of those 12v ones that I bought at least 25 years ago. It has a built-in pressure gauge and has always worked great, and saved me from slow leaks more than a few times. It’s small and light and it must have been fairly cheap (because I’m cheap!). It’s never taken more than about 6 or 7 minutes to top up even a badly underinflated tire (~15 lbs) up to a slightly overinflated pressure of around 37 lbs. It’s certainly much slower than a gas station compressor (and yes, they are now coin-operated here too) but perfectly tolerable, and it can produce higher pressures than any car or ordinary truck tire would ever need. The air hose clamps on to the tire valve – I just watch the tire and check the pressure gauge every few minutes. Couldn’t survive without it! You should give the idea another chance – maybe check some reviews.
How about leaving the compressor where it is and using a 100’ air hose on a reel? A bit pricier than the other suggestions though…
I have two of these (cigarette lighter powered), which I keep in different vehicles. My experience is the same as what wolfpup posted, and they were both relatively cheap, probably about $20 each.
At most they take 5 to 10 minutes even on a badly underinflated tire. The only way I can see it taking 30 minutes is if you didn’t have it connected properly to the tire.
Sounds like you’re not seating it fully on the valve stem. My 25+ year old 12v compressor airs up 5-6 lbs in less than 2 minutes. I hook to one tire and start; clean off the windows on that side; rinse lather repeat for the other tires while doing small cleaning jobs around the car.
Thanks folks. Um, I can assure you I know how to hook up a valve stem to a compressor. Real compressor, 12v toy, different types of bikes and bike pumps, whatever. I used to be a pump jockey back in the day when we would air up tires while we pumped gas for customers. Perhaps I ended up with a couple of totally POS 12v compressors, I donno. But I’ll never try that route again. Twice, or maybe three times burned with them.
Another thought: poking around a bit, I see there are “tire inflators” that only plug into 120V (do not have an option for cigarette lighter. Possibly these have a bit more oomph that the cigarette lighter models, but don’t draw as much current as a compressor? I had one years ago and it worked fine (but loudly). I frequently see surf fishermen using them to pump their tires back up after having deflated them for driving on the beach.
Home Depot sells them, and their return policy is pretty generous if you want to test one out…
Hmm… Thanks Marvin. Sorry to be a stick in the mud about those 12v ones but twice burned, three times shy. I may try one that is meant to plug into my 4Runners 110v though. If it’s made for a cars 110v 400w.
I’ve got one of these.
Note that it’s all metal construction. I’ve used it to reinflate pretty big tires on a Ford F250 4x4 after offroading. It fills them up in a quite reasonable amount of time. My friend unfortunately had two bad ones before he got one that worked. Mine worked fine and still works after 4 years or so of very occasional use. I had a mostly plastic one that was crap.
If you just need a pump to check and top up your tyres the “Xiaomi Mijia AirPump” will do the job.
I have one and it does what it says on the box.
I jut use a bicycle floor pump to top off my tires when needed. One of the full size Takes less than a minute per tire.