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TIRE TIPS // SEASONS

How to Store Your Off-Season Tires

THE SHORT ANSWER

Store off-season tires clean, dry, in sealed bags, away from sunlight, ozone and heat, stacked flat if they are loose and hung or upright if they are on wheels. A garage floor or a cool basement is fine; a sunny deck, a hot shed or a spot beside the furnace is not.

BY THE RIM2RIM CREW PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 3, 2026 4 MIN READ

Why storage matters more than people think

A tire that spends six months in the wrong place ages faster than one that spends six months on the road. Heat, sunlight, ozone and moisture all attack rubber, and none of them care that the tread is nearly new.

The set most often ruined is the summer set, because it goes into storage in October when everything is fine and comes out in April when nobody is inspecting it closely. Six months next to a furnace or under a south-facing window will do more damage than a whole winter of driving.

Clean them first, and let them dry

Wash the tires and the wheels before they go away. Brake dust, road salt and the grit off Highway 2 are corrosive, and left on an alloy wheel through a winter they eat the finish and start the corrosion that later causes a slow bead leak.

Soap and water is enough. Skip the tire shine dressings before storage: most of them are solvent based, and the point of storage is to leave the rubber alone. Let everything dry completely, because a bagged wet tire grows exactly what you would expect.

Mark each one before it comes off, LF, RF, LR, RR, so they can go back on in a rotation that makes sense. A grease pencil or a strip of tape does the job.

Bag them

Once dry, put each tire in its own airtight bag and get as much air out as you can. A heavy contractor bag taped shut works. Purpose-made tire bags work better.

The reason is evaporation. Tire compounds contain oils that keep the rubber flexible, and a sealed bag slows the rate they migrate out. This is the single cheapest thing you can do for a set that has three or four seasons left in it.

Stack them the right way

Loose tires with no wheels: stack them flat, one on top of another, no more than four high. Do not hang a tire without a wheel from a hook, because the weight distorts the bead over months.

Tires mounted on wheels: hang them on proper hooks or stand them upright in a row. Do not stack mounted tires more than four high, and rotate the stack order if they are down for a long time.

Standing tires upright on concrete for months can flat-spot the bottom, so if they are on the floor, give them a quarter turn every month or two, or put a board under them.

The right place, and the wrong ones

The right place is cool, dark, dry and stable. A garage that does not bake, an unheated basement corner, a shop rack. Between about zero and twenty-five degrees is ideal, and steady beats warm.

The wrong places, in the order we see them go wrong here:

Beside the furnace or the hot water tank. Heat is the fastest ager, and electric motors on furnaces and freezers put out ozone, which cracks rubber.

Outdoors under a tarp. In Okotoks that means plus thirty in July under plastic, hard UV, and condensation every night.

A sunny window or a south-facing shed. UV chews the sidewalls.

On the ground outside. Moisture from below, insects and rodents from everywhere. Mice in a stored winter set is a real and expensive problem out on acreages.

Pressure, tape and small things

Store them at their normal pressure or a little below. There is no need to deflate a stored tire, and leaving them very soft encourages flat spots.

Keep them away from solvents, fuel, oil and brake cleaner. Petroleum products destroy rubber on contact.

Write the date on the bag. When a set has been down for two summers in a row, that is worth knowing, and so is the DOT code if the set is getting on.

If they are on wheels, a light coat of wax on the wheel face before storage makes the spring clean-up easy and holds off the salt corrosion for another year.

When to let the shop hold them

Storage at a shop exists for a simple reason: most people do not have a cool, dark, dry, mouse-free place with room for four tires, and the ones who do would rather use it for something else.

What you are actually buying is the removal of a chore. No tires in the trunk of the car, no wrestling them down basement stairs, no rolling them through the house in October, and no discovering in April that they were stacked against the furnace all winter. The set gets chalk-marked and racked in a climate-controlled warehouse, out of the daylight, and it is waiting in the bay when you show up for the changeover.

It also makes booking easier. If your tires live here, we can slot you in the week before the rush instead of the week after it, because nothing depends on you remembering to load them.

Quick answers

Do tires really go bad in storage? They age. Heat, sunlight and ozone do the damage, and a stored set in a bad spot can lose years of life without ever being driven.

Flat or upright? Loose tires flat, up to four high. Tires on wheels hung or standing upright.

Should I deflate them? No. Store them near their normal pressure.

Do the bags matter? Yes, more than most people expect. They slow the loss of the oils that keep the compound flexible.

How long can a set sit? A season is nothing. Two or three years stored properly is fine if the rubber is still supple. Past about ten years from the DOT date, replace them whatever they look like.

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