Choosing a tyre storage facility

How do you choose the right facility for responsible storage?

A few words about a relatively new service that has recently started appearing en masse on the price lists of tyre-fitting shops and garages: seasonal responsible tyre storage. The service itself is very much in demand among motorists, but proper tyre storage requires all the right conditions to be created, and far from every small company can afford that.

So, if you have decided to leave your tyres in storage with a tyre centre or a garage, you first need to read the storage contract carefully. It must state exactly what conditions the tyres will be stored in (humidity, air temperature), and also what liability the organisation providing the storage bears, not only for the loss of your property but also for damage to it. If you are simply offered a receipt for handing over the tyres, you are better off refusing.

The mechanism for assessing the tyres’ condition on drop-off and collection is also very important, as is the mechanism for compensating losses. Remember that contracts running to 5 pages or more in small print are drawn up precisely so that the organisation’s chance to dodge liability in any situation is hidden among a mass of unnecessary text, so an overly long and confusing boilerplate contract should put you on your guard right away.

If the contract has all the clauses that protect your rights, you can move on to the next stage: inspecting the room where the tyres will be stored. At a proper facility there should be a thermometer and a hygrometer hanging on the wall by the entrance (a device for measuring air humidity): look at them. If the humidity is off the scale at over 85-90%, you can say goodbye right away. If there are no instruments, try to imagine what the microclimate in this room will be like for the whole expected length of time your tyres will be there. Any electric heaters should also put you off storing tyres at a facility like this: they dry the air out too much, which is also very bad for a tyre.

Either way, leaving tyres at a tyre centre or a garage without inspecting the room and reading the contract is extremely risky: there is too great a chance that, when you collect them, you will find you urgently need to buy new tyres.