Highways Agency traffic info on Googlemaps

I’ve just spotted that the “traffic” button on Google Maps has gone live. I’m not sure exactly when this happened.

This feature overlays up to the minute traffic data provided by the Highways Agency at all levels of zoom of Google Maps, which makes it useful to see exactly where queues are forming.  As I type at 5pm on a Friday, the usual congestion is visible on the M25!

The Highways Agency provide the same real-time information on www.trafficengland.co.uk as well as sites for Scotland and Wales, but the colour-coded overlay showing average speed on Google Maps makes it easier to see precisely where the problems are.

Another feature is the ability to select historical data for any day of the week and time, to see where queues are likely if you are planning a trip.

The Highways Agency provides its traffic information to Google in a Datex II format, which is a European standard developed specifically for road data information exchange.

Power at any price?

Some weeks ago, I did a bit on the ‘Bike’ eco-Triumph that the magazine converted to run on alcohol and promptly tuned for top speed to the detriment of fuel consumption, which to my mind made the whole exercise daft.

That was in the back of my mind when the topic of fuel consumption came up the other day on one of the forums – a rider had just had one of the performance enhancing kits fitted to his litre-plus sportsbike, had it all dyno-tuned and set up professionally.

And when he came to ride it on the road, he found the fuel consumption had plummeted, something he clearly wasn’t expecting!

I’d come across this little hitch myself some years back, having bought my trusty GSXR750WN proudly sold with a loud system and a jet kit as a performance aid.

Having never ridden an un-tweaked model, I couldn’t tell diddly squat about whether the mods worked in terms of power output or delivery, but the bike swallowed petrol quicker than I swallow real ale. The fuel consumption hovering around the low 30s mark, way off the 40mpg figure I was expecting from magazine tests!

I’ll admit that I was somewhat spoiled by my old (and totally unmodified) 145 mph Yamaha FZ750, as it was blessed with an extremely efficient motor which would happily return fuel figures nudging 60mpg at motorway cruising speeds.

So I found the trade-off to a bike that had about 10hp and 10mph in hand over the FZ at a cost of nearly twice the fuel consumption rather less than appealing in terms of the hit on my wallet… not to mention the fact that the straight line performance was actually poorer, given that I was filling up twice as often and taking longer to get anywhere!!

So why does a bike with a performance enhancing kit actually need more fuel, when a reasonable guess would suggest that if the engine was working more efficiently you’d actually get MORE miles to the gallon after tuning?

Well, the answer is in that word ‘efficiently’.

An engine producing maximum power is NOT working at peak efficiency. Let’s explain a bit of basic chemistry.

Internal combustion engines burn fuel to create kinetic energy, mixing the fuel in the cylinder with oxygen in the air to create carbon dioxide and water.

Without doing the calculations or getting too complicated, a perfect air:fuel ratio for pure gasoline is 14.7:1 – ie, you’re mixing 14.7 parts of air to one part fuel. At this ratio, there is sufficient air in the inlet charge to completely burn all the fuel. Modern fuel has varous additives so the ratio is typically a bit down on this, around 14.1:1 to 14.3:1 according to some figures I’ve seen, but the result is the same – all the fuel injected into the cylinder will be burned leaving no excess of either fuel or oxygen.

Obviously, you don’t want too little air in the charge (or too much fuel) as some of the fuel will be unburned. Not only is it wasted, but it’s thrown out of the exhaust port and contributes to pollution, particularly particulates and toxic carbon monoxide. This is known as a rich mixture, and it burns cool and so limits power. This was definitely the case with my GSX-R, judging by the plume of black smoke on full throttle that looked like an F-15 on full boost, and the soot all over the back of the bike at the end of a long run.

On the other hand, you don’t want too much air in the charge either. Although this would effectively burn all the fuel, the combustion can run hot. Whilst in theory this could prduce more power, in practice it can melt pistons and also causes atmospheric nitrogen to oxidize to produce nitrogen oxides, another pollutant and a source of acid rain.

Now, it might sound like the perfect ratio is thus the stoichiometric ratio. In fact, until recently, due to relatively primitive inlet and exhaust design and lack of suitable materials to resist melting and expansion, combustion wasn’t complete and engines ran a bit rich.

Through the 80s, as engine and carburettor design improved, using innovations like four valve heads to improve combustion, so did fuel consumption improve too – or rather more accurately, more power was squeezed out of an engine without significant compromising fuel consumption!

However, motorcycle engines still produced more pollution than the equivalent car engines, so the emission levels were ramped down, leading to the demise of virtually all carburetted models in recent years, and the fitment of catalytic converters on most new bikes.

The latest injection technology allows very precise measuring of the air fuel ratio, with various sensors operating to keep things in tune. The one most riders will have heard of is the lambda sensor. This sits in the exhaust and measures the amount of residual oxygen (for lean mixes) or unburnt hydrocarbons (for rich mixtures) in the exhaust gas. A lambda of 1.0 means there’s a perfect stoichiometric burn, rich mixtures are less than 1.0, and lean mixtures are greater than 1.0. To keep the catalytic converter working properly, it’s important to keep the lambda figure close to 1.0.

So what’s all this got to do with fuel consumption issues after getting the bike tuned?

Well, we’re back to that word efficiency. In short, by throwing a bit more fuel into the motor than that perfect mix, we can get more power out of the engine. Typically, to get maximum power, we’ll want a ratio between 12.5:1 and 13.5:1. To quote one website offering motorcycle tuning:

“All motorcycles have an optimum air/fuel ratio for producing maximum power and torque. Factors such as emissions regulations, after market exhausts and air filters can alter your motorcycles fuel/air ratio resulting in loss of power and poor or
snatchy throttle response.

They go on to say:

“The correct air/fuel ratio number (say 12.9:1 or 13.2:1) depends upon many factors like combustion chamber design but what we want is that figure at every point in the curve (straight line).“

Dyno figures will usually demonstrate that there’s a power increase over stock, but dyno runs are done at full throttle. And
as most of our riding is done at part throttle, clearly we don’t actually need (or even want) all the power that could be delivered by opening the throttle all the way. You could get the same power increase by opening the throttle a bit more! And most of the gains at usually at peak revs.

Think about it, if you own a 600cc bike and up, how often do you have the throttle on the stop at peak revs?

Not very often I’ll suggest.

So what are the gains? Why would we want to do this? What’s the point of remapping if we can just open the throttle a bit further to accelerate at the same rate anyway?

The key point is that their “correct air/fuel ratio” is actually running rich – it’s only “correct” if you want maximum power at any particular throttle opening. On steady-ish part throttle, where we spend most of the time, the same “slug” of air-fuel mix is still doing about the same amount of work to push us the same distance at the same speed.

The problem is that if you remap your engine to run at the “correct” 12.9:1 ratio rather than stoichiometric 14.3:1 we’ll assume for modern fuel, the bottom line is you’re actually burning around 11% more fuel to do that same amount of work. If you were getting 40mpg before the tuning work, you may well find your fuel consumption is now around 35-36mpg! And if the motor’s set to run richer than that, it could be worse!

Are we just throwing fuel down the exhaust pipe? The reasons usually advanced for remapping is that it’s either to sort out the fuelling after fitting a new can, or to sort out power delivery problems that the standard mapping has failed to deal with. And dyno curves show remapping might well cure a hesitancy when opening the throttle, and if the ignition is remapped at the same time that may well smooth out noise regulation flat spots in the power curve.

You have to ask yourself would you really notice the improvement. It seems to depend on the bike, the rider and the usage.

On a race track – if you’re good enough to lap consistantly, I’d suggest you probably would notice the difference – better drive out of corners is often quoted as a benefit.

On the road – it would probably depend on your riding style and the bike. I’ve ridden a couple of the bikes supposedly cursed by flat spots and can’t say I noticed a huge issue with either of them, but another was like having a delayed on-off switch instead of a throttle and I certainly couldn’t have coped with that for long. So it’ll be a very personal decision.

But one thing we can be sure of – like most things in this world, we don’t get something for nothing.

Useful Website – “Traffic Signs and Meanings”

One of the things that always amazes me (I know, I should have got used to it now!) is how little use riders at all levels make of road signs.

It’s as if they think they needed to learn them to get a licence, whether it was the old one with the Highway Code quiz at the end or the new computerised Theory test, and could then forget about them.

Few riders use road signs to gather as much information as they could. I’ve even had a rider with other advanced training turn up and said “oh, I never use road signs, I always look for other clues as it’s more advanced”.

Which is a distinctly warped attitude, considering that as human animals, the use of signs is an integral part of our communication skills.

Visual signs as diverse as company logos, health and safety signs, book and CD covers, gestures and facial expressions are all part and parcel of gathering information to allow us to make decisions.

So it seems a bit daft to throw away a highly standardised and usually consistent source of information, either by a lack of understanding of what signs offer in the way of knowledge of the road ahead, or by deliberate choice in the case of the advanced rider mentioned above!

However, getting back to the point of the post:

www.trafficsignsandmeanings.co.uk is a new website “formed to offer a unique reference point on all you need to know about traffic signs.”

The authors point out that “even for experienced drivers, getting your head around all of the traffic signs, traffic signals and road markings, and what exactly they are instructing you to do can be bewildering”.

Well, bewildering might be going a bit far, and at the moment they haven’t covered my two pet hates; priority working and paired mini-roundabouts – but overall there’s some useful information on there, as well as snippits of history and usage of things like cats-eyes, and some other info on issues like speed cameras and stopping distances.

There are a few inaccuracies such as the statement suggesting “if you see a double white line you are forbidden to overtake”.

This is a common misconception and one that causes a lot of grief between car drivers and motorcyclists. In fact, where the line on your side of the road is solid, it does NOT mean you cannot overtake – the law says you may not straddle it or cross it, except to turn right or to pass an obstruction such as a parked or broken down vehicle.

So if the road is wide enough, where there is slow moving or stationary queues, the rider can quite legally filter alongside the traffic so long as he doesn’t straddle the white line.

There are also some exceptions concerning the right to pass cycles, horses and road maintenance vehicles travelling at less than 10mph – note that tractors are NOT included in that list of exceptions.

However, a queue of stopped traffic does NOT count as an obstruction, and this is something the police are very hot on – you will get pulled for passing a queue of traffic on the wrong side of a solid line. Nor would I use this as an excluse for blasting up the outside of traffic moving at normal speeds on a fast road!

Those provisos apart (and I’ve pointed these inaccuracies out to them so hopefully the site will be corrected swiftly), if you’re new to riding or driving, it’s worth bookmarking and spending a few minutes browsing time here.

London Bus Lane Etiquette

As bus lanes operated by TfL have been opened to bikers in London, it
seems a good time to discuss safety issues when using bus lanes.

This isn’t a new idea, some London bus lanes have been open for some
time as part of a trial, and of course in other parts of the country
bus lanes have been available to PTW’s for some time.

But it’s important to emphasise that this privilege could be withdrawn
if we abuse it or if the accident rate turns out to be unacceptably
high. So the onus is on us as riders to use them sensibly now to ensure
we can continue to use them! Using an empty bus lane as an excuse to
blast to the front of the queue at high speed is not likely to further
that end.

Some riders have questioned the benefits, but many of the routes that
are open are along main roads into London and a careful ride down the
adjoining bus lane is definitely quicker than sitting in a four mile
queue of standing traffic and rather less stressful than filtering down
the outside of that queue.

Although the trials have been a bit indeterminate on whether there are
fewer risks to riders, my gut feeling is that it’s probably safer,
provided some simple precautions are taken by the rider.

A key consideration whether you are an experienced commuter or
recreational rider who’s decided to try his hand at riding into town
rather than drive or take the train, is that whilst bus lane access
offers new opportunities to riders, it also means there are new dangers
to think about, and some new wrinkles on hazards we should already all
be aware of.

The first thing to remember is that we do not have exclusive access to
bus lanes – we’ll be sharing them with other road users including
pedestrians crossing the road, buses (obviously), taxis, bicycles, car
and van drivers using the lane illegally and last but not least other
bikers on a variety of machines from 50cc scooters to sports bikes.

The second important point is not to forget that other road users will
not be used to bikes in them yet, so extra attention is needed whilst
everyone gets used to the new system. Even bus drivers will have to get
used to the speed that bikes appear compared with the average cyclist.

The third point is that most of the hazards that might catch us out are
common to any multilane road, but there is one important difference -
the traffic on the bus lane is more than likely to be moving relatively
freely whilst the lane on our right is often slow moving or stationary.
This difference in speed is known as lane shear and leads to most
accidents in queuing traffic. The greatest danger is when the lane
alongside us is stopped.

So what problems can we expect? I can foresee several areas:

• vehicles stopping ahead of us
• vehicles emerging from the left
• vehicles encroaching on or entering the bus lane
• vehicles, cycles or pedestrians crossing our path
• problems when we try to leave the bus lane ourselves

Vehicles that will stop in the bus lane
We need to remember that the buses and taxis use bus lanes. They stop;
regularly! Buses stop at bus stops, but taxis can and do stop anywhere,
and rather suddenly at that! And we will also encounter other vehicles
that are parked or unloading, perhaps legally in a bay or illegally
outside the paper shop or at the cash point machine! If they stop just
ahead of us or the bus we’re following, they can bring the lane to a
halt unexpectedly. Keep a good following distance – too close and we
not only lose our own chance of seeing ahead, but no one can see us
either.

Vehicles emerging from our left
One worry I have is that drivers emerging from our left will tend to
glance down the bus lane and if they don’t see a bus, will then focus
on the main flow of traffic to look for a gap and pull out without a
further check. Meanwhile the approaching biker thinks “they must have
seen me” and carries on without any precautions.

Drivers see what they expect to see – and they are looking for a bus in
a bus lane, and to a much lesser extent, a cycle. It’ll take a while
for drivers to get used to seeing bikes in the bus lane. So we need to
react accordingly by slowing and covering the horn and brakes.

Also we need to beware of the driver who will just pull out anyway in
the full knowledge we are there and will have to stop. Again, the
greatest danger is when the lane beside us is stopped.

Vehicles that will encroach on or enter the bus lane from our right
Other hazards to watch out for are things that might make a vehicle encroach on or enter the bus lane temporarily:

• Junctions
  on the RIGHT; if a car ahead stops to turn right, expect the car beside
  you to swing left into the bus lane to pass it; if an articulated lorry
  needs to turn right into a narrow road, it may swing left first into
  the bus lane to make the turn.
• Traffic islands in the centre
  of the road, for example at traffic lights or on pedestrian crossings;
  trucks may need to move left to pass to pass them safely and encroach
  on the bus lane.
• Roadworks or vehicles parked awkwardly in the other lane; drivers might enter the bus lane to make space for oncoming vehicles.
• Left Hand Bends; if the road is narrow, expect the trailer of an articulated lorry to encroach on the bus lane.

We’ll encounter a similar problem at the end of the bus lane, perhaps
at a junction where traffic moves left legally before turning left.
It’ll be tempting to try to get past as many cars as possible, but far
safer to slow down and let vehicles merge. Watch out for the driver who
dives in before the bus lane actually ends too!

Vehicles turning left across our path
When we are passing to the left of a stationary or slow moving queue,
it’s up to us to remember drivers are not likely to be aware we are
coming up on the inside. According to a bus driving friend, drivers
don’t spot approaching double deckers before they turn left across the
bus lane, so there’s no reason to expect they’ll spot us on two wheels.
It’s not always simple carelessness, the view out of most nearside door
mirrors on cars is frequently poor.

So we’ll need to apply top observation skills to spotting places where
drivers can and will turn to the left and moderate our speed
accordingly.

That’s not just junctions, but anywhere on the left where they can
turn; petrol stations, carparks, driveways, delivery accesses. Anywhere
there is a dropped kerb is where someone can turn!

Vehicles turning right across our path or crossing
The biggest danger is probably where vehicles can cross our path from
the opposite direction. The result is a near head-on collision and the
results are often serious for the rider of the bike. This kind of
accident contributes significantly to PTW fatal accidents in London.

Where traffic is heavy but slow moving, vehicles turning across our
path into side turnings from the opposite direction or from the
opposite side of a cross roads won’t see us either even though they’re
facing us – we are hidden by the traffic queue in the road to our
right. Once again, the faster we ride, the less chance we have of
reacting to such hazards.

In particular take care if traffic in the lane alongside comes to a
halt – the chances of someone flashing a turning car through a gap and
into your path is extremely high.

Cyclists turning right from our left
In particular be considerate of cyclists, don’t blitz them, remember
they’ll be turning right themselves so pass carefully and give them
plenty of room whilst passing..

Pedestrians crossing the road
Pedestrians can cross just about anywhere, and so to a lesser extent
can cyclists, though any junction is a likely spot. Of course, watch
out for pedestrian crossings – they will walk through stationary
traffic straight out in front of you.

Speed & Stopping Distances
Don’t underestimate the benefits of what seem to be quite small
reductions in speed in terms of stopping distance. Just as when you
double your speed your stopping distance quadruples, so if you halve
your speed you can stop in one quarter of the distance. So even
apparently insignificant reductions in speed can have quite noticable
consequences.

If I’m covering the brakes, at 30mph I can stop the bike in about 5
bike lengths on a reasonable surface. At 20mph, I can stop the bike in
2 bike lengths! Yes, TWO! Now work out the distance from where the kerb
turns into a sideroad on the nearside and where the offside front
corner an emerging car will be. That should give you some idea how late
you can brake and STILL miss that car!

The other thing to consider is that when we hit the brakes we don’t
lose speed in a linear fashion – if we had enough space that we could
JUST stop without hitting that emerging car at 20mph, you might be
surprised to know that if we were in fact doing 30, we wouldn’t hit the
car at 10mph as we might expect; we’d still be doing 20mph!

Other Tips
When the traffic is flowing, try not to sit alongside lorries, coaches
or vans, all have restricted views from the driver’s seat, and even if
the driver looks, he may well not be able to see you down in the blind
spot on the left. The best option is to stagger adjacent to the gap in
the other lane.

Watch out for foreign plated vehicles. Drivers from abroad won’t be
used to the system in the UK anyway, and will probably not be aware of
motorcycles in bus lanes.

Know the route; read the signs, know the layout of the junction and where vehicles move.

Watch the road surface. Road works are likely to have left poorly
filled trenches, manhole covers are often found right in the middle of
the lane as is loose gravel, and of course, buses spill diesel and drip
oil right down the middle of the lane. The wide white lane marking
extremely slippery too.

Try to avoid swapping between the normal carriageway and the bus lane.
If we move into the main flow of traffic to pass a stationary bus, we need to watch out for the pedestrian who’s just got off.

Final Thoughts

Most importantly if someone does something silly and we can’t swerve or
stop, we are going too fast! Don’t forget the bike’s fitted with a
horn, either – don’t be afraid to use it.

Lastly, there are what one person described as the “more touchy feely
considerations”. Most of what we do on a bike looks dangerous and
aggressive, and initially at least, it’s likely that quite a few
drivers, pedestrians and cyclists won’t realise we are actually not
breaking the law, but using bus lanes perfectly legally. It is going to
annoy car drivers even more than usual to see bikes swarming past
whilst they are stuck listening to the traffic report on the radio, so
try to pass considerately.

Maybe all this sounds horribly dangerous, but hopefully you can see there are simple rules for
staying out of trouble. As someone else said to me when I was
discussing the issues of riding in bus lanes, “think of it as filtering, rather than as a licence to blast along an empty road, and you should be OK”.

Good advice in my opinion.

2009 starts with a big freeze – heated kit

At 3pm, I’m sat at home pouring hot water in the bird bowl to try to keep it from freezing and give the poor critters something to drink. The ice here hasn’t begun to melt all day, and the grass and drive have still got the snow on them that fell on Monday night. And the early flowering daffs I bought from the garden centre are looking a bit of an optimistic purchase.

Blimey, it’s just like a proper winter back when I used to be a courier.

Astonishingly, I’ve actually managed to do a bit of training, though the course on the 30th of December was curtailed by the ice, I didn’t even bother to head to the carpark where I normally do slow control and emergency braking exercises. We’ll do that another day.

So, how to keep warm? Well, it seems to take a big freeze for every generation of riders to realise that heated clothing really IS the way to go.

The first problem is to understand why we get cold. The movement of cold air over our bodies carries away heat. If we cannot replace that lost heat via our own metabolism we get cold.

Unfortunately, we’re partly fooled by how we feel the cold. As we start to chill, the body shuts down circulation to the extremities. So, the first bits to feel cold are fingers and toes. But they are only the symptom, not the illness. More on that in a moment.

Nevertheless, most riders choose to treat the symptom. So we obviously try thicker gloves. I rapidly discovered that the thicker the glove, the less I could feel the controls and operate them smoothly. I’m not a fan of overgloves, fingerless mittens or even those split finger gloves we can get now.

Bar muffs are another favourite option to keep hands warm. Every winter, riders try them out and find they are mostly pretty awful as designed and for a couple of pieces of cheap plastic with bit of synthetic fur underneath I always felt that the price was silly expensive. There are some better made neoprene offerings available now, but they are still expensive.

When I was despatching I only tended to use muffs in the depths of the winter on long runs, because round town they interfered too much with the controls; it was hard to reach the indicators, and impossible to get to the kill switch, but the main problem was air pressure pushing the front brake or the clutch levers at speed. I got round this with the same obvious solution others managed – something bolted to the end of the bar that kept the muff from folding back. And the budget courier alternative was a couple of large milk containers, cunningly cut to fit over the bars.

So next stop for me in the quest to keep warm was heated gloves. When I tried inner gloves, the wires dug in the backs of my fingers and burned them, and neither they or the heated leather gloves lasted long before the wiring failed. The quality and design has certainly improved but at a price. And they still only heat the hands.

Then I tried heated grips. They worked nicely on fairly short rides, but on longer trips, the backs of my hands got cold and despite feeling toasty on one side, I could feel them going stiff. And the wiring failed on the throttle side after a couple of months, which got expensive in constant replacements.

But the big problem with gloves, mitts and grips is they only heat our hands. The really important part (and this isn’t anything new, it’s been known about since the 1930s) is the temperature of the blood in the body core.

Generate a big enough chill factor, and the blood temperature in the body core starts to fall as cold blood flows back from those cold hands and feet. Once core temperature has dropped far enough, no matter how warm the hands feel, that circulation shuts down to our hands, our feet, arms, legs – and also to our brain!

This is the earliest stage of hypothermia, which is never far away on a bike on a cold day.

So what about those heated gloves? The problem is that they can’t keep the core temperature high. The sensation of warmth in the hands is mostly an illusion caused by the nerves sensing the heat.

So if we want to keep our core temperature up, what about insulation? What about layers, what about thermals, I hear you say? On a long run or when it’s really cold we can dress up in all the thermal layers we like but ultimately whether we insulate ourselves with newspaper and bubble wrap, or spend pots of cash on some fabric that’s supposedly been up Everest, the temperature gradient across our clothing will chill us.

The more insulation we apply, the slower the rate of cooling, but eventually we’ll chill. That’s basic physics.

And the downside of the layering approach is that we can easily end up like the Michelin Man, and seriously compromise our bike control.

It’s like double glazing and cavity wall insulation in that cold room, yes the room will stay warm longer, but given a long enough cold spell, it’ll still get cold without some heating.

It doesn’t matter if we put on thermal vests or thermal gloves, or use all the clever microfibre and wicking layers in the world, we simply don’t generate much heat sat motionless on the seat of a bike (it’s about 100w of heat at rest), and in any serious cold weather, on any other than a short run, it’s not enough and we’ll start to chill.

The solution is to increase the amount of heat we’re generating, so that we balance the amount of heat being lost. Given there’s a limit to what our own metabolism can achieve, there’s only one way to do that – turn on more bars on that electric fire – almost literally!

After freezing to near-death through winter after winter, I got online in ‘95 and started reading about riders in USA and Canada and how they coped with the extreme cold – and they have some REALLY cold weather in the northern US states and in Canada. Heated clothing!

So in 1995, I finally bought a heated waistcoat. WOW! What a difference. I finally felt warm even on long runs in extreme conditions.

The layering principle now came into its own – with the heated vest over a tea shirt but under a fleece, I was toasty warm at ‘normal’ cold winter temps between 0 and 5c, and with a bit more layering survived midnight blood runs when the temps was 5 below.

With heat being pumped into my body core by the vest, peripheral circulation kept moving and though cold, my fingers and toes didn’t seize up. In fact, with heated clothing, its only when the temperature drops below 5c that I feel the need for anything thicker than my summer gloves.

So what to buy?? Well, there are plenty of options of heated vests if you look around from £80-odd to approaching £200, and most of this kit is now equal quality to the US brands that I would have recommended a few years ago. Some of it allows ‘daisy-chaining’ of other heated kit like gloves and insoles for the boots, which might be useful if you suffer poor circulation already.

Are there any budget options? Well, I’ve already mentioned and reviewed the Exo2 heated kidney belt, which is under £50, here on the blog, but the reason it’s cheap is because it has limited heating elments. There are also DIY kits where you buy the heating element and sew it into your own clothing.

What about the current draw? Many riders are worried about overloading the charging system. I’ve run heated clothing for years on a variety of bikes (GPz500, NX650 Dominator, GS500, ER-5, Hornet, FZ750, GSX-R750) and not had any problem with the heated kit and the lights working at the same time. The only one I ride at the moment that can’t cope with the 60/55w headlight AND the heated clothing at the same time is my 1982 CB250RSA which has a fairly puny 100 or 120w alternator.

The Exo2 Stormrider takes 4A at full draw… use the equation “watts = amps x volts”, so 4 x 12 = 48w. If you used one of those, you’d probably find you wouldn’t need the heated grips as well! As our body can produce around 100w, wearing one of these babies adds 50% to the amount of heat we can generate!

If you just go for the heated kidney belt (which as I’ve said is OK for short runs or cool days) you’re looking at under 1A – that’s 12w or so, only just over twice the power taken by the tail light bulb!

Still worried that the bike can’t cope? Well, there are battery packs for some of the expensive options mentioned above, though anything which comes with a “rechargable battery pack” means something expensive you’ll be throwing in the bin in a year or two’s time when it’s hit the recharge cycle limit (think laptop battery!), plus yet another charger to lug around and lose.

Alternatively, there are budget powered waistcoats for as little as £20 which run off standard AA rechargables. Whilst I have been rather sceptical about how good such a budget waistcoat would be, I bought one from Maplin when the temps plummeted back in November and I felt my Exo2 kidney belt wasn’t quite offering enough heat for 3 or 4 hour sessions on the bike.

As it happens, the temperatures have got colder still and so I’ve worn it quite a few times over the last 2 months. The first thing to mention is battery life. The Maplin offering runs for about 2 1/2 to 3 hours continuously on a set of 6 (2×3) 2700mAh NiMH rechargables, not the 40 minutes suggested on Maplin’s own website; it was still going after a 2 hour ride from Maidstone to Oxford last month, and was just fizzling out after 3 hours on the road on the 30th. A spare set of similar capacity rechargable batteries would give you upwards of 5 hours continuous heat, which isn’t bad!

The heating element gets hot enough to feel as pleasantly warm through a tee shirt. That’s surprisingly effective if you have insulation over the top. I’ve been wearing mine over a thin sleeved tee shirt, with a microfleece over the heated bodywarmer, an EDZ pertex microshell thingie over that, my ‘Stich riding suit and an unlined nylon jacket as a wind stopper on top of that.

Together with my Exo2 heated kidney belt running off the bike’s mains, I’ve have been warm enough on several courses on days when the temps haven’t got above zero.

Downsides:

1) The heating element isn’t very big – covers an area about the size of the palm of your hand on each side of the front of the chest with another around the back of the neck.

2) They’re a bit small in terms of sizing, but they’re not really intended to be worn as a top layer over several shirts and fleeces, but over something like a teeshirt.

Realistically, they’re not nearly as good as expensive heated kit but at £20 in the Maplin January sale they are a steal if all you want is something to add a bit of warmth on a short to medium commute and you can remember to recharge the batteries!

EDIT: since I wrote this, Maplin seem to have sold out but a quick Google turned up some other sellers of similar kit on sites such as

http://www.primrose-london.co.uk
http://www.greenfingers.com
http://www.heated-motorcycle-clothing.co.uk/waistcoat.html

A couple of these are 12v too, so you could wire them into the bike via a fused fly lead.

Conclusion: you don’t have to spend a fortune to turn the heat on.