A valve is a rubber component that spends its whole working life stretched through a hole in a steel rim with the tyre's full pressure behind it, in the wettest and saltiest part of the car. It perishes. The base cracks where it flexes against the rim, usually invisibly, and what it produces is a slow loss of pressure that everybody blames on a nail.
The only moment a valve can be changed without paying for the work twice is when the tyre is already off the wheel. So a new tyre goes on with a new valve as a matter of course rather than as an upsell, and the old one does not go back. A perished valve under a brand new tyre is a slow puncture you have paid to have installed.
Cars with pressure sensors work a little differently. The sensor is bolted into a metal stem and stays with the wheel, but the rubber seal, the retaining nut and the valve core are consumable and get replaced from a service kit each time. The sensor's own battery is sealed inside it and eventually runs out.
The awkward one is the night before a long drive. We are the exception: the phone is answered at that hour and a van can be with you on the South Circular or on the drive with the right size on board. Old tyres leave Blackheath, Ladywell and SE13 with us, every time. You watch it happen in Ladywell, or at the kerb in Hither Green. A SE13 address in Loampit Vale and one in Lee are the same round.
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Valves have a harder life in SE13 than the mileage suggests. Cars here stand still for days at a time on the same patch of road, salt and water gather around the rim edge across a winter, and low speed kerbside manoeuvring flexes the base of the valve constantly. We fit where the car already lives.
A full set fitted on the street outside the house. Three of the old valves cracked visibly at the base the moment they were flexed, which is normal at that age and invisible while they sit still under a tyre.
Pressure sensors on all four wheels, so each stem took a fresh seal, nut and core before the new tyres went on. The sensors themselves were healthy and stayed where they were. Nothing was replaced that did not need it.
A car off Loampit Vale had been losing pressure on one corner for months and had been through two fruitless searches for an object in the tread. The valve was split at the base.
Included. It is a small part fitted while the tyre is already off the wheel, and billing separately for it would be a strange way to behave. What would be worse is leaving the old one in and having you back a month later with a mystery leak.
Not the sensors themselves, unless one has already failed. They come off with the old tyre and go back on with the new one. What gets replaced is the seal, the nut and the core, because those are the parts that leak once disturbed.
You can ask, and the answer is no. A valve that has been through four or five winters has been flexing against a rim edge the whole time, and refitting it means stripping the wheel again when it goes.
On most cars the system relearns the wheel positions by itself over a short drive. Some want a reset through the dashboard menu and a few need a tool, and you are told which yours is before we start.
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