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.
