Tubeless on the road - yes or no

How wide are your tyres? Personally I don’t do it for widths below 30mm. 

How often do you puncture?

Have you tried TPU tubes?

Strangely enough it depends on how heavy you are and how wide your road tyres are. I run 28mm tubeless tyres on the road at 55/60 psi. No issues with this set up for the last 5/6 years. If you run narrow tyres and weigh 90kg you may need to use a higher pressure. Not sure on the cut off but I think sealant would struggle to work with 90psi tyre pressures. 

If I could fit 32mm wide road tyres (I’d need a new frame) I could run 50psi.

Posted by: scotroutes

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How often do you puncture?

Have you tried TPU tubes?

This ☝️

I puncture very infrequently on the road (jinxed it now...) so didn't see the point, last I checked, a good set of non-tubeless tyres with latex or TPU tubes were lighter and faster than equivalent tubeless.

Now TPU on the road, I think two punctures in three summers riding, both easily repaired by sticking another tube in and being on my way. If I rode the same tyres in winter it might be a different story but I use some much chunkier Pirelli Cinturato so can't really compare (they're tubeless but I've never seen any evidence of sealant or punctures so I genuinely think it's just the tyre construction doing it's job...)

I also have had bad luck with tubeless not sealing on the gravel bike so often wonder why I even bother with it on gravel!

Edit: in response to Aberdeenlune's post, I fit that exact profile he describes, ~92kg and 26mm tyres on winter bike, 28mm on summer bike, running approx 70psi in both.

When I first started commuting to work I was getting punctures at least twice a week, so soon went tubeless and never had another (known) puncture again. I was using 38mm and later 40mm tyres on a gravel bike though.

I think on skinny roadie tyres I'd probably try TPU tubes first.

Touch wood, they're a game changer for me. I'm 85kg and have gone from 25's with tubes at 90 psi to 28's without at 60psi. The difference in grip and comfort is brilliant, and I think they're faster too. I intend to go up to 32's once these tyres wear out.

I am running tubeless on my road bike and it's saved me fixing a puncture this week.  I've paired DT Swiss ARC 1400 wheels with Vittoria Corsa Pro tyres in 30mm and Vittoria sealant.  I must have nicked the tyre just as I got to work as at home time the rear was soft.  Pumped it up, span the wheel a few times to move the sealant about, rode home with no issues.  That was Tuesday so it's covered 100 miles since then and has been fine.

Might be area/road dependent but I've had maybe 3 punctures on my road bike over all the years I've been riding it, and one of those was because I was on a towpath treating it like a gravel bike. So for me it's not really worth the hassle of initial setup, keeping on top of sealant top ups etc.

93kg here and use tubeless on the road on two bikes (3 if you count the 40mm slightly more roady wheels for the gravel). One bike on 28mm tyres and the other 35mm. Both been excellent. Only issue I had was a tan wall tyre that constantly leaked from the sprue (where extra the little rubber nubbins are from the moulding process). But that served me right for trying to be a tan wall tosser. 

I'd be slightly more inclined to look at tpu tube if I was doing multi day rides again as the faff factor if you have a complete failure with tubeless can be a bit grim. 

Posted by: convert

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I'd be slightly more inclined to look at tpu tube if I was doing multi day rides again as the faff factor if you have a complete failure with tubeless can be a bit grim. 

If I was starting again and hadn't invested so much in tubeless, I'd definitely be trying some of the reinforced TPU tubes on my gravel bike, I've ended up with some pretty heavy and slow rolling tyres after two or three slashed Vittorias (grey sidewalls, so not exactly lightweight race tyres). A slashed tyre with tubes is more likely to stay inflated (unless latex 🙄) and even if it did fail it would be a simpler, cleaner and quicker fix than a tubeless slash.

But I still don't know if reinforced TPU can shrug off Hawthorne...

Running tubeless on 28s, 70ish psi for 90kg last 3 years, 3000km. Had just one puncture that sealed with a Stan's spider, but wept a little, lowered the pressure on advice and it is now not an issue. I run Bontragers with light puncture protection, and the lower pressure adds to comfort

With newer wheels and >= 30mm tyres I think the value of tubeless comes back (maybe even 28mm tyres, but I have no experience of that). I think once you're below 60psi the sealant has a much better chance of working and for me they feel better than TPU or latex.

I abandoned road tubeless in the early years after a few absolute shockers that wouldn't seal and were an absolute pain to get a tube into. Modern wheels & tyres are a definite improvement IME.

30mm at 55psi tubeless, love em. 

ps if I get a pu****re now you lot will be in my bad books 

50/50

Erring towards tubes <30mm and tubeless >32mm.

If you fit tubes you will get punctures

If you go tubeless, eventually you will get punctures, but less frequently and they will be a bit more faff to fix.

At some point it's guaranteed you'll have the sort of issue where you wish you'd gone with the other option. 

I've tended towards tubes on audaxes and tubeless on club-runs.  But now have one bike for everything so have TPU tubes.  The trouble there is they're difficult to patch and IME tend to develop 10's of pinholes where they stretch around the tyre bead/rim so re-using them is risky. I'm tempted to go back to carrying Michelin ultralights (~75g) as spares and just swap them to fresh TPU tubes when I get home.

I run 23's on my olde worlde roadbikes at ~90psi. I rarely get punctures in my butyl Supersonics. They're a bit heavier than TPU but a) I have them and spares and b) They are easily repaired. I've used tubeless on the road on other bikes and still have one setup with 30mm tubeless. I'm not convinced it's worth the aggro for pure road but if I were either a chunky monkey and/or getting loads of punctures, I might reconsider. I had a couple of real shockers trying to get resealed then swapping out to tubes on the road that has put me off. That plus the periodic maintenance. Gravel, is another story. Tubeless all the way.

I have only ever had one non sealing puncture on the road and it was a 44mm tyre. Have also run 28 and 29mm tubeless with zero noticeable punctures. Go tubeless and drop the pressures and you will get far fewer punctures.

I'm about 100kg.  

I've run road 28s tubeless at around 70psi on 21mm internal with no issues in a good couple of thousand km on my gravel bike and that's in all weathers including **** Hampshire back roads.  

The tyres are some quite sensible Giant things.  

My road bike doesn't have the clearances for wider rims and 28s tubeless so I run the narrower OEM's and 28s with tubes.  I've had one puncture on this bike in about 800km (about 2 1/2 months of dry weather). 

My road bike is a gravel bike these days so clearance is not an issue, I ran 40mm Gravel king slicks F&R last year and the rear was a bloody nightmare for picking up flint cuts that might seal if I was lucky. 

I’m very much into the idea of larger volume tyres in the road now, they’re just so much more comfortable over longer rides on horrible roads, but I swapped the rear to a 36mm Tubed Rubino Pro, far more still running the GK tubeless on the front but I think I might trade up to a Corsa, which now apparently come in 38mm and opt for TPU again… 

Tubeless feels nice for a bit, but doesn’t seem to deal well with flint, especially 

~70kg on 38s/40s, commuting rough roads and towpaths all seasons, 40psi ish and 25mm rims. Not had a puncture in 5 years. And that was a successful cut. Learnt my lesson and don't use Gravel kings any more. Last time I changed tyres i think I pulled out 18 hawthorn/blackthorn ninjas. 

No way I'll be running tubes ever again on that bike.

I would always default to tubeless. I never thought I got punctures and that was due to my weight ~70kg and the I live (Aberdeenshire) but occasionally inspecting my tyres on sealant top up I could see where its done its job. I guess there's always large pieces of shrapnel that are going to defeat the sealant but fundamentally you still need quality tyres, sealant and a good setup.

Currently riding 33mm conti 4seasons on my new bike with tubes FFS 🤣 

How heavy are you?

How wide are your tyres and rims?

What pressures do you normally run?

Spent the last 6 years working for a tyre company, and 6 years before that running my own shop... My answer is that the wider the tyre, the lighter the rider, the lower the pressure, the better the benefits of tubeless... Aside from that, there simply isn't a tubeless sealant out there that works above about 45-50psi, so my suggestion is not to run anything you wouldn't be confident of nursing home at 45-50psi if you did actually pick up a puncture...

I've done some back to back testing of tube type tyres with TPU tubes against tubeless with sealant, and subjectively, I preferred the ride feel of the tubed tyres with TPU tubes in... This was on 28's at around 75psi (I'm 95kg, much less and I'd risk pinch flats)...

Running tubeless on my road bike again right now, only because I've inherited some free 30mm tubeless tyres (and free tyres always win over anything you've got to pay for yourself), and I'm good with 65psi in these, and would be semi confident I could nurse the bike home with a tyre at 45-50psi if I did pick up a puncture at least... If I was buying tyres for myself, I'd stick with tubes at 30mm but probably go tubeless on 32mm up, because of the lower pressures I could run in the wider tyre. If that makes sense...?

To be honest though, TPU tubes really have brought a lot of the benefits of tubeless without the hassle for road bike users... They're a lot less faff, no mess, and they are a fair weight saving over butyl tubes too.