Nutz About Bolts Prius Maintenance Videos

Here’s how to replace your TPMS sensors

2010-2015 Toyota Prius TPMS sensor replacement

 

I've never seen a manual bead buster before, that was cool.

 

yeah, this isn't bad. I've used the Hunter bead breaker before at the dealership, those are air powered and was nice. This will do just fine for just replacing TPMS. I didn't want a tool that removes the tire as well because then you'd have to balance the wheel.

 

Nice video. Have you ever tried replacing the batteries?
I saw a video of someone doing it. Not too difficult.

They're wheel covers not hub caps.
Toyota manual says 76ftp, not 80. Unless they changed it since 2010....

 

Another way to activate the sensors is to simply drive about 100 ft.

 

that’s funny how the 2 is different, hub caps and wheel covers.

as for the torque, 76-80 ft lbs isn’t much of a big difference. Just make sure they don’t fall off.


As for the tpms sensor battery change, I have seen someone open up the silicone and replace the battery, I’m trying to figure out what type of silicone it is since it’s rubber and not those cement type rtv. Do you happen to know what it is?

 

good to know. I didn’t have to do that, the scan tool took care of it

 

The sensors have motion detectors and go to sleep when stopped. This saves the batteries. A rf signal from enabled scanners can wake them (Techstream can not), lowering air pressure to an alarm point will activate them and simply driving wakes them.

The lower air pressure trick is a good way to determine which sensor is bad; however when you can buy four for $40 good sense dictates changing them all.

Harbor Freight has manual tire machines for $59 and $79. I simply bought four sensors, wrote the ids into the tpms ecu ahead of time and then paid a small tire shop $60 to change all four. Thirty minutes later drove away and the tpms light was gone.

A small price to pay for ten more years. You get a warning when cold weather dramatically reduces pressures overnight or when a nail has reduced one tire to 20 psi but it still feels normal. Saving one tire or one injury makes tpms a no brainer.

 

touché

 

With low torque, 4#'s is a lot. walfart would torque my van's to 150! The manual was 95 I believe.
I would always have to use a 2ft breaker bar and bounce on it to loosen them so I could torque them correctly.
And all 20 of them got stripped! They are horrible.
They wanted to put 90 on the Prius. I showed them in the manual were it said 76.

The "hub" cap was a cap for "hubs" with brake shoes, and front rotors with the bearings part of the rotor.
Wheel covers, cover the whole rim....

It was a few years ago when I saw that video. I just bought new ones because they were only $10 more for each one.
It would have been more than $40 worth of work to do all the work to just replace the batteries, plus the cost
of each battery. Plus you don't really know how long the new batteries will last. I would have to guess not
the 10 plus years the OEM ones did...
He did use heat resistant silicone, that didn't get super hard. I don't remember what it was called.

 

Not a Gen3 but the Gen5 OEM are snap-in rubber valve stems. I have 4 on order-supposedly OEM-we'll see.

Anyway, the wheels I got were from a '26 and just had the sensors removed by snipping the stem from the inside (bummer for me).

I think you can just assemble a stem to the sensor and then pull it in place.

If you had to connect the sensor to the stem (with a screw) with the stem mounted, I think you'd have to dismount the tire.

I don't know why they went to the snap-in rubber stems. Perhaps the possibility of using fancy valve caps without fear?

 

Languages evolve. Words start out meaning one thing, but for various reasons the meanings can drift. Whatayagoingtodo…

 

the funny thing is, they sell torque sticks in 65 ft lbs and 80 ft lbs. we always use the 80 ft lb torque sticks to torque the wheels down. There isn’t a 76 ft lbs torque stick, and 80 ft lbs is the standard torque range for a sedan car, so 4 lbs of torque on these wheels isn’t a make or break situation.

I just saw the video again, he used caulking silicone to seal the tpms sensor battery. All that work for just the battery isn’t worth it to me, so I’ll just stick doing this way

 

Hopefully @tideland will add this latest to post #1.