A tyre that has been driven is warmer than the air around it, and warm air pushes harder. That is why a slow puncture can read almost normally when you park in the evening and be visibly down by morning. The leak has not worsened overnight. It has stopped being flattered by its own heat.
There is a second reason mornings are when these surface. A car standing still rests its whole weight on one small patch of each tyre, holding the bead against the same piece of rim seat for hours. Where corrosion has crept under that seat, or the valve has hardened with age, a stationary tyre leaks in a way a rolling one does not. Pump it up, drive to work, and by lunchtime it looks healthy again.
Which is a large part of why we work nights. A tyre found soft at eleven, before anybody has driven on it, is very often still a repair. The same tyre after a morning commute frequently is not, and nobody enjoys hearing that at half past eight.
It is worth saying plainly what "24 hours" covers, because the phrase gets used loosely. Whether the car sits on a drive in Shepherd's Bush or has stopped somewhere less convenient, the service is the same. Steep camber in Ravenscourt Park? We move a few metres, Shepherd's Bush or anywhere else. Blocked drive in Barons Court? Open kerb in King Street? Either works. A W6 address in King Street and one in Brook Green are the same round.
24-hour tyre callout in Hammersmith is part of our wider 24-hour emergency callout across London and the home counties cover. For 24-hour tyre callout in Hammersmith, call 07717 389637 or get a price for your tyre.
Almost every car here stands still from eleven at night until seven in the morning, in a permit bay or on a driveway off Fulham Palace Road, and that is the window in which a slow leak shows itself. Ringing when you notice the tyre, rather than when you need the car, is the difference between a repair and a replacement.
A driver had been topping up a front tyre every few days and had talked themselves into blaming the cold. It was a roofing tack sitting square in the centre of the tread, invisible with the wheel on and obvious once the tyre was off the rim.
Two winters of salt had lifted the paint off the rim seat of an older alloy and the tyre had been weeping air there for months. Nothing was wrong with the tyre. We broke the bead, cleaned the seat back to sound metal and resealed it.
A cold snap in the small hours set off pressure alarms along a row of cars near Brook Green. Two had lost air simply because the temperature dropped, which needs a gauge rather than a fitter. The third had a screw in it.
Often it is nothing but physics. Pressure falls as temperature does, so a sharp cold night can drop every tyre far enough to trip a system sitting near its threshold. What tells you it is more is a tyre still asking for air after you have set it cold.
You can, and people manage it for months. What you are doing is running a tyre at whatever pressure it has drifted to between top ups, which overheats the sidewall and wears the shoulders down at the edges.
Because the tyre is at its most repairable while it is still standing in the bay with air in it. Driving to work on it is the thing most likely to turn a repair into a replacement, and finding it at eight when you are late is when that gets decided.
Usually the seal between the tyre and the wheel. Standing still, the weight of the car deforms the bead against a corroded seat and opens a path. Rolling, the tyre warms, the bead settles back and it holds. It is fixable only with the tyre off the rim.
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