Dynamic Bike Care Turblo+ electric pump

The Dynamic Turblo+ is the latest in what’s an exploding market of powered inflators for your bike. This one’s more of a workshop tool, and it’s pretty good considering it’s at the cheaper end of the market: easy to use and capable of doing plenty of tyres on one charge.

> Buy now: Dynamic Turblo+ for £69.98 from Dynamic Bike Care

This is a fairly big (68x47x153mm) and weighty (472g) unit that’s designed more as a workshop tool than as something you’d take with you on a ride. It comes with a Schrader hose and a Presta insert which will also work with Schwalbe Clik valves. If you’re a road rider then most of the time you’ll be using that, which is good as there isn’t anywhere to store it.

The head rotates, but I had to add an o-ring between the Presta adaptor and the Schrader head, otherwise the head would bind a bit and become hard to twist, which made screwing it onto valves a bit of a pain. You get a ball needle too.

On the front there are six buttons and a display. There’s a power button, and the middle two buttons toggle through four presets. The top two select a pressure: double click the minus button to switch between bar and PSI. So you can store front and rear pressures for two bikes, for example. That’s pretty handy and makes faffing around with changing the pressure less of an issue.

Hit the power button when you’re connected, and the Turblo+ will pump your tyre up to the stored pressure, and then stop. You can just leave it to do its thing.

Because it uses a hose, it dissipates heat better than some smaller pumps, so it’s fine to use on TPU tubes with plastic valves. It got warm when I was using it, but never really hot.

The last button is a torch, which is just an LED on the top of the unit. It could be handy if you’ve dropped a valve cap in a dark corner. It has a flashing mode too, for what purpose I’m not entirely sure.

Rates of inflation

The Dynamic Turblo+ isn’t the quickest in terms of inflation. From flat it took 88 seconds to inflate a 30mm road tyre to 4.5 bar (65psi). You could certainly get it done much quicker with a track pump, and even the saddlebag-friendly Cycplus AS2 Pro Mini inflator was about 20 seconds quicker. So if you’re habitually in a hurry it’s probably not the pump for you. But again, you can just leave it running and fiddle with other things if you want.

It’ll pump up a lot of tyres. While the Cycplus will do three to that pressure, and some of a fourth, the Turblo+ was into double figures before the battery indicator on the front started flashing, managing 10 full inflations and a half-one before it died. You’re still going to need to charge it from time to time, but if you’re just topping up your tyres before you go out it’s going to last a long time. Having said that, given that the battery is nominally about five times bigger than the AS2 Pro, you might expect it to do even better.

> How to choose the best bike tyre pressure – balancing speed, comfort and grip

The battery indicator is a traffic-light affair, but in my experience it went orange almost immediately, on the first inflation – not at the 70% charge Dynamic claims – so it wasn’t quite as useful as it might have been.

Realistically, you’ll be using the Turblo+ in the workshop as it’s too big – about the size of a walkie talkie – to carry around with you. I was initially wondering if it could replace my battery pack on an audax ride, but at only 2,000mAh the battery is far too small for that, even if it does have a USB-A output to charge other stuff.

Given the size of the Turblo+, and the size of the Cycplus AS2 Pro Max pump I’ve been using up until now in the shed, I’m surprised the battery isn’t bigger, to be honest. There must be plenty of space in there. If the internal battery was 5,000mAh or 10,000mAh, for example, I might be tempted to swap it in for a long ride instead of carrying a battery and a pump.

While we’re on the subject of workshops, Dynamic says you can seat a tubeless tyre using the Turblo+ but I wouldn’t rely on it. The constant stream of air might be enough to seat a particularly amenable tyre – I’ve managed it once – but it’s not pushing enough volume (a claimed 22l/min) to really be the tool for that job. It is handy for checking your car tyres, though, if for example you’ve got a really finicky Citroen where the underinflation light comes on if you lose about 0.5psi of pressure. It takes a while, but I’ve already saved a few quid at the petrol station.

Value and conclusion

At £69.99 the Turblo+ isn’t that expensive compared with most of the electric pumps we’ve tested, which tend to be upwards of £70.

The good news for Dynamic is that only one we’ve tested is cheaper, the Cycplus A2. The bad news is that it’s a lot cheaper, and it’s also the most directly comparable: a big workshop unit that’ll do a load of tyres. It’s not quite as easy to use – you don’t get the presets and the display’s not as good – but the 5,200mAh battery is much bigger so the powerbank function might actually be useful, and it has a torch too.

The Fumpa Pumps OG is the only other pump we’ve tested that’s designed more for the workshop. It’s considerably more expensive than this one (£119), but it’s also much quicker, and the build quality is as good as it gets. It’s also fully rebuildable, so if bits break it’s not just going to end up as e-waste.

Given the choice I’d go for the Cycplus over the Turblo+, but that’s not to say this isn’t a decent unit, and I’d happily have it as a workshop companion.

If you want to stick with acoustic options, check out our guide to the best bike pumps.

> Buy now: Dynamic Turblo+ for £69.98 from Dynamic Bike Care

Verdict

Good workshop inflator that’ll pump up plenty of tyres on one charge

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