Prestacycle Prestaflator Go

If you’re on the fence about portable electric inflators, the Prestacycle Prestaflator Go might just be enough to get you to ditch your manual mini-pump or CO2 cartridges. It’s great! Fast, reliable, and easy to use, and just the right size.

> Buy now: Prestacycle Prestaflator Go for £99 from Prestacycle

Before the Prestaflator Go arrived, I have to say I was pretty sceptical about electronic inflators. Like all new cycle tech, I wanted to try it for the novelty but I doubted we’d become friends. CO2 cartridges are fine, and mini-pumps so good and so small nowadays, why bother? And then I remembered thinking electronic gears were a silly weighty unnecessary failure-inviting boondoggle, right up until the moment I spent some time with them. Disc brakes, too, didn’t want them, didn’t need them. Until I tried them. But that’s it. Oh, and e-bikes. Hated the idea of e-bikes, until I tried them.

Can you see the pattern? Tech comes to something that works well already, claiming to fix a problem I think doesn’t exist, and I’m disdainful right up to the point I try it. Then I’m hooked. Here and now in 2025, I’ve been spoiled by electricity and technology – and going back to rim brakes, mechanical shifting, and non-electric cargo bikes seems barbaric.

So it was with the Prestaflator Go. It arrived and I unboxed it without expectations. The packaging is inexpensive and functional, and it includes a USB-C cable. Some people will expect one and become vitriolic when one isn’t included; I’m in the other camp, I’m drowning in USB-C cables, 70 or 80,000 at the last count. I see it as a waste of money that could have gone into a minutely better product perhaps, or a cheaper product and less e-waste. But I understand companies that play it safe by including one, and I can only hope we reach critical USB-C cable mass soon.

There’s a plastic Ziplok-like bag to keep the pump in, a football needle and a Presta head adaptor. (There’s a case and an extender hose available too, though not included.) It’s also, allegedly, compatible with Schwalbe’s new Clik valves.

It’s a nice looking bit of kit, well made, and it feels premium.

In use

While unboxing the Prestaflator Go, sitting in my very echoey office, I of course inadvertently turned it on. It’s the most I’ve jumped in decades. It’s VERY loud for something so small. As soon as that happened, I remembered people mentioning the volume in reviews. Once you’re expecting it, and you’re outside, it’s not a problem. About the same noise level as a hairdryer.

For my first go of the Go, I set the pressure at 37psi to inflate a 38mm Gravel King tyre, after letting the air out and squeezing it to dead flat.

The Presta head adaptor screws into the Schrader-sized hole in the inflator (where it will remain), and then you simply push the valve into the head. It has a urethane seal in the head that grips the valve, so you can literally just push it on, and pull it off when it’s finished. The seal is tight and strong enough to support the weight of the inflator, so you can have your valve at the top of the wheel pointing down, and the pump will hang off it no problem.

Turning it on and watching the tyre inflate before my eyes was unexpectedly pleasing. It was also rapid. This is a fully charged inflator bringing my 38mm tyres up to 37psi from dead flat. Quick and easy. (Note, the screen is stable and doesn’t flash, this is just a mis-sync between the camera’s frame rates and the Prestacyle’s screen.)

I became a child once again. When you get a new tool and you’re delighted with how it works, you inevitably wander around the house trying to find excuses to use it, and to hell with the consequences and casualties.

When I tested the enormous Kärcher pressure washer last year, I immediately aimed it at my fence, promptly stripping the paint from it and ripping the top layer of wood off. Oops. With this, I immediately thought of all the things I could inflate, and set off looking for them. All my tyres got the treatment, as did a rugby ball, a football, and I wished we had an air mattress… and it’s lucky we don’t have a pet puffer fish…

Happily, no inflatable bladders or other objects were harmed this time. In short, I ran out of inflatables before the pump ran out of milliamps.

So, should you buy an electronic pump and should you buy this one?

I really want to shout ‘Yes!’ so you too can experience the joy, but I’ll try to be a bit more circumspect; only you can decide where and if ‘want’ becomes ‘need’, and if that becomes ‘purchase’.

CO2 is fine, though the ease of ‘fire once’ is as much a bug as it is a feature (it’s easy and works well, until something goes wrong and you’ve wasted your one shot). It’s also often advised against with tubeless. And the trade-off with the tiny form factor of mini-pumps that makes them so easy to carry is that it also makes pumping tyres hard work, time-consuming and fiddly.

For my part, I’d take the mini-pump and CO2 out of my saddle bag and replace them with this. It’s a 20g penalty over my hybrid CO2 inflator and mini-pump, though more compact and easier to pack. In fact, in the last few weeks it’s sort of replaced my track pump too. It’s simply faster to set the pressure I want, press the inflator onto the Presta valve and wait usually no more than a few seconds as the pump brings the tyre up to pressure before every ride. It then goes straight into my saddle bag and we’re away.

Gauge the pressure

Before I used this one, I’d already concluded that it would be a bit pointless getting an electric pump without a pressure gauge, and I haven’t changed my mind. Not having a pressure gauge would limit it to emergency use only on the trail, and I’ve been most surprised by how the Prestacycle is in fact a quality-of-life upgrade, for use at home, before every ride.

Prestacycle claims a 1% accuracy of the gauge, up to 100psi. I didn’t have any calibrated equipment to test this against, but my old faithful track pump reported identical pressures in the tyres, so I’m happy to take Prestacycle’s word for it.

How much does it blow?

Electric car drivers talk about range anxiety, and I think this see-saw of trade-offs, size vs battery capacity, will be at the forefront of most people’s purchasing decisions when it comes to electric mini-pumps.

So let’s talk about how much it blows. A great deal, it turns out. Prestacycle rates this as 7+ inflations of a 40mm gravel tyre to 35psi. I think that’s conservative. I got just under nine inflations on a brand new, fully charged battery to 37psi, leaving two minutes between inflations. I was deeply impressed. For 28mm road tyres to 80psi, it’s rated to 4+, and with Prestacycle’s conservative estimations, I bet you’d get five or more.

Any downsides?

First off, the ‘format’ of e-pumps. Batteries run out, and the more juice you want out of your mini-pump, the bigger it’ll have to be before it’s not terribly mini anymore.

And heat. As the pressure you’re filling increases, physics says that generates heat. So the pump gets hot after ‘longer’ use and at higher pressures. Filling two gravel tyres to 37psi never really exceeded ‘warm’, but if you’re running TPU inners at high pressure you might want to buy the optional extender hose, as TPU has a comparatively low melting point. (I didn’t test this, and Prestacycle rates the pump as TPU safe, but if you’re filling multiple TPU tubes… like all e-pumps, the heat builds.) Similarly, if you run super-high-pressure tyres you might melt an inner, or even your valve, but this is just the physics of high pressure and temperature, and isn’t unique to this inflator. I don’t ride anything more than about 40psi anymore, so it’s a non-issue for me.

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

If forced to find fault with the Prestacycle, I found only two, and they’re quite minor.

First, the three buttons on the device have a cheap, slightly rattly and incongruous plastic feeling in an otherwise really premium solid-feeling product. But they work just fine. Trivial stuff.

Second, the battery indicator was not super accurate, and shows only three different colours (not unusual amongst its peers): red for 0-30%, yellow for 30-60%, and green from 60-100%. So green could be 100% or 61%, and I think a 40% swing of ambiguity and uncertainty is slightly too large. This is compounded by it not being a reliable barometer of remaining capacity. After seven complete inflations it still showed ‘green’, indicating (unbelievably) more than 60% capacity remaining. It went orange during the eighth inflation, and red during the ninth and final inflation.

Weights, measures & the competition

I imagine everyone will arbitrate for themselves the perfect intersection of battery capacity vs size. You can get bigger and you can get smaller, and their size corresponds to the number of tyres they can inflate on a single charge.

The Prestacycle measures 78x51x31.5mm and combines two batteries connected, I presume, in series, effectively to yield a single 750mAh battery.

Comparing it with other electric mini pumps out there, just going by stats for some, others we’ve reviewed… Muc-Off’s AirMach Electric is 12mm shorter and 40g lighter (claimed); but with a comparatively small 300mAh battery and no pressure gauge, this is an emergency-only option (enough for roughly two inflations). It is cheaper at £75, and a full review is on its way.

There’s a Pro version that ups the price to £100 and the mAh to 450, and includes a pressure gauge. Stu reviewed it recently and thought it was very good. The Prestacycle is fractionally longer, about a cm, but narrower, lighter, and with a notably higher inflation capacity.

The Cycplus AS2 Pro that Dave loved, and was awarded a road.cc Recommends badge, is 0.8cm shorter and about 13g lighter, with a 420mAh battery. Dave’s only negative was the limited capacity. The Prestaflator, for an extra 13g and 8mm (and an extra £17.50 – the AS2 Pro is currently £81.47), almost doubles the battery capacity and the number of inflations. There’s a Max version of the AS2 Pro with higher capacity for £96.89 (currently reduced to £85.63), but it’s a chunkier 205g and 54x32x81mm.

> Buyer’s Guide: Best bike pumps — from hand to floor pumps, inflate your tyres with ease and precision

Topeak’s E-Booster Digital is 99p more, 7mm longer (though it has a ‘built-in’ head), 12g heavier, and has a 600mAh battery giving fewer inflations.

And the Flextail Pro is again all but identical in dimensions, 20g lighter, but with significantly less battery capacity at 450mAh, though a lower RRP of £64.

In short, you could have something a fair bit smaller with no pressure gauge and only a third the number of inflations, or roughly the same size but with a little less capacity. Or if you need something with much more capacity you have to start looking at noticeably bigger and heavier 200g plus pumps.

Conclusion

For me, the Prestacycle has fallen perfectly into the Goldilocks zone: it’s compact enough, and nine inflations for a mid-volume gravel tyre is well beyond plenty. On the size vs capacity front, it also seems to beat every other unit we’ve had in to test. Whatever wizardry the Prestacycle people have used to fit 2x750mAh batteries into the device is paying dividends – it has more capacity than anything else we’ve tested for the same size, and even equals some pumps that are around the 200g-plus mark.

I’ve read reviews of other electronic mini-pumps elsewhere, and some people conclude and assert that it/they ‘won’t fully replace a handpump’. The truth is, for me it does. And it’s mostly replaced my home track pump too. And I think it’s better than CO2 for tubeless. I didn’t in my testing, nor do I think I have ever, suffered a puncture or series of them that this wouldn’t have solved, that a CO2 or mini-pump would. It made me want to buy one to keep in my Tern e-cargo bike. I feel I see someone changing a puncture on a London road once every week or two, and I’d love to pull in to help, and offer it like a friendly roving inflating Samaritan. Wouldn’t that make your day as you fumbled with your micro-pump?

This is a brilliant product and a real quality-of-life upgrade.

I haven’t tried it, but the Cycplus AS2 Pro is our current champ of the electronic inflators. It’s a smidge smaller and lighter, but the Prestaflator almost doubles the Cycplus’s battery capacity, which is a huge upgrade for a 13g penalty and a £10 up-charge.

If you’re on the fence about mini-pumps, with ‘inflation anxiety’, the Prestaflator Go is what you’ve been waiting for, and has to be the new champ.

> Buy now: Prestacycle Prestaflator Go for £99 from Prestacycle

Verdict

Almost flawless electric mini-pump, small enough and with enough oompf and capacity to convert the sceptics – I was one

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