FWIW, I’m one of the rare few that run sealant in my butyl tubes for the gravel/touring bike I use in (relative) wild abandon. Hasn’t failed me yet, and zero punctures in close to a year. It’s got all the benefits of running true tubeless, and without the hassle of cleaning out spent sealant.
Downsides are;
Usual rules of tubeless apply (so valve stems need to be between the 9 o’clock and 3 o’clock positions when the bike isn’t being used
Sealant needs regular (albeit less frequently than true tubeless) top ups.
Since you can’t remove the spent sealant, you end up getting marginally heavier with each sealant top up.
That said, I only ever lose a few psi over a few weeks.
I’ve got my distance bike set up tubeless, and I’m happy with it. Also use Conti GP5K tires, 28 mm (though I’ll switch to 30 or 32 when I replace them). I think I’ve had one puncture, ever (which in itself is amazing), and that sealed itself in seconds. I felt extremely smug in that moment. The tires won’t hold pressure when the sealant dries out, so you’ll know when it’s time to replenish, but if you’re smarter than me, you’ll write the replenish date on the sidewall so you can keep better track. I travelled with this bike once, and with the tires partly deflated, the bead knocked the rim tape askew and I had to replace the tape. Something to keep in mind.
I tried setting up my commuter bike tubeless (different rims, different tires) and it was not great. I had a really hard time getting one of the wheels to hold pressure, the valve I was using was also not a great fit and I had to try something different. I wound up reverting to tubes.
Overall I think it is a worthwhile technology, but there have been a lot of growing pains as it has matured, and as the whole hooked/hookless debate shows, there are still some basic questions that remain unsettled (I am pro-hook, fwiw).
I’ve been running tubeless for a little over 2 years without any issues. I’ve got 30mm GP5000 S TRs on my wheels right now (55 psi in front, 56 psi in the back), with Orange Seal doing the hole plugging. My wheels are tubeless wheels with mini-hooks (Reserve 40/44s). Setup was pretty simple with no issues. I love being able to run wider tires on the road at lower pressures without having to worry about pinch flatting.
I think we’re mostly past the days when setting up and using tubeless tires on the road was a crapshoot.
Still on the fence on whether road tubeless is the way to go. It depends I guess.
Am used to running tubeless for CX/gravel and think it’s great for larger volumes and lower pressures. Like @Not_Fast_Enough_To_Keep_Up, for at least a decade have been running butyl inner tubes filled with sealant. Mostly tubulars 25mm to 30mm wide, and with great mileage on average on the tires because of this strategy.
When I prepared a set of tubeless ready wheels with Challenge Strada Pro TLR 27mm for running with sealant in the springtime last year, I had an unfortunate sidewall slashing on the first ride that forced me to eventually use an inner tube. After plugging the hole and hoping to get the sealant to fill. Have ran the setup for a couple hundred kilometres after patching the tire from the inside afterwards. Ride feel is great with lower pressures. Not sure if it beats a supple tire with lightweight latex tubes though.
For now I would go tubeless when volume is medium to large for road setups. Where I would consider 28mm the minimum. An inner rim width to match. 30mm or even 32mm would make me feel more confident it will hold up and work as expected. Pressure over 4 bar has been troublesome for sealing holes properly in my experience.
For riding events I would dare to choose tubeless over inner tubes with higher pressures, like 5,5 bar with 28mm tires, for the chance to not have to stop. Although I have been using tubulars with TPU inner tubes topped with sealant until now.
I have been on road tubeless since the middle of 2019, after suffering two punctures in three consecutive road race. If you choose to go road tubeless, be prepared to deal with these:
Tubeless tires are usually harder to mount and seat. I had one wheel/tire combo that I set up for my wife a couple of years ago that took two days to eventually seat after throwing everything but the kitchen sink at it. Tubeless tires installation have gotten easier the past few years but you still might run into an occasional stubborn tire/rim that needs booster pump or air compressor to seat.
Tubeless rim tape. It is very likely that your rims have spoke holes, so you will need tubeless rim tape. You will need to find the rim tape of the right width for your rims (stay the F away from Muc Off tubeless rim tape, unless you fancy spending a lot of time scrubbing the stubborn adhesive left behind when the Muc Off tape is removed). Improperly applied tubeless rim tape can lead to slow leak and sealant leaking into the rim cavity.
Sealant. There’s no getting around this if you want to use tubeless-ready tires. It can be messy to install and it will most likely be messy when you get a puncture that won’t immediately seal, because the sealant will be spraying all over your bike, your cycling kit, and if it’s a rear puncture, whoever that’s unfortunate enough to be drafting right behind you. It’s damn near impossible to remove dried sealant stain on porous items like your cycling kit. Some sealants last only a month or so before drying up while others may last more than 6 months so you will need to set up reminder to inject or pour (if you prefer to unmount the tire) fresh sealant when the time is up. I am using Orange Seal Endurance and I set up a reminder in the ProBikeGarage app to add fresh sealant after 120 days. I sometimes also shake the wheels to see if I still hear sealant sloshing inside.
Tire plug kit. I personally think this should be a requirement if you want to go the tubeless route. Sealant will seal most punctures but I have encountered three - two in the past couple of months - that required the use of Dynaplug because the sealant could not seal the punctures. If you do not have any tire plug, you will be looking at putting a spare tube inside while dealing with sealant dripping all over.
In spite of what I mentioned above, I won’t go back to tube. Since the middle of 2019, I have had at least one and a half dozens of punctures and most of them were sealed by sealant with minimal air loss because I won’t find out about them until a day or so later when I saw dried sealant on the bike. Out of those, there were about half a dozen that I stopped to rotate the puncture to 6 o’clock to allow the sealant to pool down at the puncture. And out of the half dozen, three required tire plugs.
The issue I found is that tubeless doesn’t hold a seal or seal punctures well at higher PSI for road. So when I got a few punctures (including a bad one from a shard of glass) the sealant flew out of the tire instead of sealing it. Obviously this can happen off-road, but having this experience multiple times in just six months turned me off of it.
My main complaint about road tubeless (based on one wheel’s worth of experience) is that it makes the bike a lot more perishable because of the sealant drying up and having to do something about it fairly frequently. Not so much of an issue if you only have a single bike, but with multiple bikes and/or wheelsets it starts to add up. Normally you can take a bike that has been standing unused for 6 months or a year or whatever, pump the tyres up and off you go, whereas the sealant thing is quite a bit more work.
Of course it depends on your situation and so on, I mean, I get a flat maybe once every 5000–10000 km (and that includes riding 22 mm tubulars on gravel and other fun stuff), so I don’t really see the problem that road tubeless is trying to solve.
My last two punctures that refused to seal - requiring a Dynaplug - are on Schwalbe G-One RS pro (700x40) and Schwalbe Thunder Burt 29x2.1. The former is a gravel tire and the latter is a MTB tire and both were run at low tire pressures (less than 35 PSI). If you were constantly having issue with sealant not sealing punctures, including tiny ones, I suspect the issue might be the sealant you were using. My road tubeless setup is Light Bicycle WR50 with Pirelli P Zero Race TLR (700x30) and Enve 4.5 AR with Schwalbe Pro One TLE (700x28). Most of the punctures happened in the latter setup and out of the dozen punctures, only one required a plug. The tire pressures in the Schwalbe setup is 65.5 PSI front / 67 PSI rear.
I’m personally very pro-tubeless on every bike (even running 26mm tubeless on my 90s steel bike), but shop experience says that mileage varies for different people.
You’ll get the best results if you run the biggest possible tyre at the lowest possible pressure, and sludgy sealants seem to work better than liquid latex at road pressures. 25mm tyres, carbon rim brakes, 110kg rider and Stan’s? Probably not going to be the best experience. The sealant will be ejected at speed before it has chance to seal, it’ll dry out quickly under braking heat, and you’ll have a very tight tyre to wrestle with while covered in sealant.
Personally, I like to use sludgy sealants that don’t “go off” like latex-based sealants such as Stan’s/Orange Seal do. I’ve had success with Finish Line and Effetto Vegetalex. The sludge seems to act like a scab, and sets a bit more permanently. If it dries up, you can just stick a bit more in and rehydrate it. Just err on the cautious side with pressures - I don’t go above 85 psi, and I’m… on the larger side. So far, in 6 years of riding tubeless, I’ve had 3 flats - one where I let the sealant dry out (my fault), a freak spontaneous flat on a perfectly smooth road (can’t explain, would definitely not have happened with tubes), and a pretty catrastrophic slash in the front tyre on a steep descent (I was able to come to a controlled stop before the tyre completely deflated, whereas a tube would’ve immediately deflated). Still yet to use my Dynaplug, so we know what’s going to happen on Sunday morning On balance, I’m sold on tubeless.
(UK-based so quite humid, wet conditions. 90+kg rider)
I should add that I am using Orange Seal Endurance currently. I had decent experience with version 1 of Silca’s sealant when it came to sealing punctures and most of the road punctures that I had were actually sealed with the Silca stuff. I went back to Orange Seal only because I didn’t like the fact that the Silca sealant could not be injected.
It may very well be the sealant and tire combo I had. But ultimately, I went back to tubes and in the years since I have had maybe 3 punctures? Less than one per season. I always feel like someone is trying to convince me I just need to keep trying different road tubeless systems when the reality is that tubes work great for me.
Tubes worked fine for a long time. If you live somewhere with decent road surfaces (and civilised humans who don’t smash glass everywhere) there’s not much reason to change.
Switched to road tubeless in 2020 and have never regretted it. I ride in mostly urban areas and was getting flats every 1-2 months with tubed tires. Since switching I’ve personally only had 2 punctures that sprayed sealant: one that sealed on its own in 2021, and another caused by a large nail a couple months ago that required a few Dynaplugs. I’ve used a single spare tube in these 5 years, and that was last month after giving it to a friend who flatted his tubed tire and promptly pinch flatted my tube on installation (he finally switched to tubeless with some advice from me the very next week).
Things that have worked great for me:
no spoke access hole rims (like my Light Bicycles) or Stan’s/DT Swiss tape
first seating the tire with an inner tube, then using soapy water on the bead
Orange Seal, which simply rubs off hard surfaces and has never stained any of my kit
Dynaplugs (which have bailed out multiple riders I’ve ridden with before I personally needed them for the first time recently)
It’s dead evident that tubeless is superior on the roads I ride. I regularly join group rides where I go 70-80 miles 1-2x per week (this includes 30 bonus miles that others who drive to the start aren’t even doing), and at minimum every other week at least one person running tubed tires flats. We wait 10-15 minutes and hope they don’t pinch their spares or have defective valves (more often than not, both happen, like with my friend). I’d say the proportion of tubeless converts keeps increasing, and it’s close to 50/50 now. The much rarer tubeless flats are repaired by Dynaplugs and we’re rolling within a minute or two, depending on what pump is used to add more air.
Tire size is also a really big factor for how easy road tubeless is, especially on older wheels. I’ve had wheels that are impossible to set up with 30s seal on the first try with 34s. Bigger tires also seal punctures much better.
My current stance is that I would only consider tubeless for 28mm or wider nominal width. At 32mm, I think I’d clearly prefer tubeless.
I’m running 28mm tubeless right now, and my bike can’t take wider tires. Last year’s experience was mixed, tbh. I’ve had two sidewall cuts that didn’t seal, so two trashed tires. I believe I’ve had two punctures that didn’t seal but that were solved with a plug, plus maybe one puncture that sealed on a ride (I only noticed it from the sealant residue on my seat tube). So far this year, no punctures!
I’m running 2019-ish Campy Boras. Vittoria Corsa Pros mounted fairly easily with one of those airshot canisters. Those are the tires whose sidewalls got KIA. Conti GP5000 AS TR and S TR are also fine. I think I seated them with just a floor pump.
A couple years back, I had a bunch of little punctures in my latex tubes that I couldn’t find. Probably from glass. That’s what prompted the switch to tubeless.
On balance, I’m sold on tubeless.
. I’m joking but also not joking.