ORANGE SEAL TIRE SEALANT REVIEW

Review by Drew Rohde

Finding the best tubeless tire sealant can be an exhausting endeavor, while others who live in more forgiving regions may not understand why they always see some guy from Phoenix complaining about dry or ineffective sealant in the comments section. No doubt about it mountain bike tire sealant is an important and often overlooked part of our ride, but luckily brands like Orange Seal are hard at work finding ways to keep us on the trail. Over the summer we put a lot of time on Orange Seal’s Regular and Endurance tire sealant. Let’s see how they worked here on the high desert trails of Bend, Oregon.

THE LAB
Orange Seal offers three different sealant options in their product line-up: Regular, Endurance and Subzero. Orange Seal’s Regular tire sealant is capable of sealing punctures up to 1/4-inch as well as slices up to 3/4-inch and has an average sealant life of 30-45 days. With those stats, Orange Seal states that the Regular sealant offers the best sealing capabilities of the three, but it also lasts the shortest inside your tires.

If you don’t want to break the bead of your tire every month or so, Orange Seal’s Endurance Sealant is designed to maintain its liquid form a bit longer. It has been formulated to maximize the longevity of the sealant, of course the downside is that it doesn’t seal holes as big or as well. Depending on your terrain and how often you puncture, this may not be an issue and could mean longer fluid service intervals. The Endurance sealant has a claimed sealant life of 60-120 days and is capable of plugging 1/8-inch punctures and 1/2-inch slices.

If you live in, you guessed it, cold climates, the Orange Seal Subzero sealant is for you. It has been formulated to withstand extremely frigid temperatures. While the Subzero offers the longest claimed life (60-180 days) of the three variants, it does have a lower sealing capability ranking. Orange Seal states that the Subzero can seal punctures up to 1/8-inch but can only seal slices of up to 1/4-inch.

A beauty of the line is the fact you can intermix all of the sealants. If you’re running the Regular sealant for a fall trip to Sedona but return to Michigan and prep for winter riding, you can top off with some Subzero sealant and trust that your tires will still have some flat-saving liquid ready for that ice pick puncture.

THE DIRT
As you could imagine there’s never a shortage of bikes, tires and wheels hitting the dirt. We’ve got a constant rotation of bikes coming and going with multiple test riders of various levels and riding styles hitting different terrain so we can test lots of gear simultaneously. Over the last few months we’ve poured Orange Seal mountain bike tire sealant into four different tires to see how it would compare to the many other sealants we’ve used over the years.

During the course of testing we rode super rooty downhill trails to desert singletrack and lava rock fields with great luck. Luckily tire casings have improved so much that we hardly get flats anymore, and when we did the Orange Seal Endurance sealant did the job. In fact, we probably picked up more minor cuts and punctures than we even realized because it sealed up holes so quickly we likely never even realized it. The Endurance sealant did last a fair bit longer than the Regular sealant, however it took a bit longer to seal punctures and would also reopen more often in the moments after a puncture when we’d start riding too quickly after the initial seal and repump had occurred. Patience is your friend and key to a good seal.

Depending on how often you want to top off fluid, we’d suggest going with either the Regular or Endurance offerings. If you regularly encounter sharp or dangerous obstacles that lead to punctures, the benefit of having a faster, more effective mixture could be worth topping off the tire more frequently. You could even experiment with 70/30 combination to get a little longer lifespan with some improved sealing properties.

The Wolf’s Last Word

Overall we were impressed with how well Orange Seal performed and did notice a difference in both life span and sealing quality of the Endurance and Regular mixtures. We would recommend either of these for riders who are looking for a quality bike tire sealant but suggest you evaluate your terrain and desire to top-off liquid so you can buy the best option for you.

Price: $9.99 (Regular), $10.99 (Endurance)
Website: Orangeseal.com

Disclosure: Our team selects all of the products we review and do so with honesty and objectivity in mind. Some of the products we receive come directly from Competitive Cyclist, who also value our readers and have offered them a 15% discount (exclusions apply) on their first purchase by using LOAMWOLF15. Through this program we may also receive a small commission at no cost to you. Thanks for your support, TLW.