heated gear

its gettin cold and thinking about gettin some , what brand stick to ? gonna start with jacket/underliner..., dont ride long in a cold but u never know when weather gonna change quick on you

I ride year round in Colorado and just use a vest.

Just go with one of the major players (brand wise) and you will be fine.

Love my Gerbing heated jacket liner. A must-have if you want to ride year 'round in CO.

I've had frostbite in my hands so my hands are very susceptible to cold. Both my bikes have heated grips, but I've found that even with bark-busters on my R1150R the back of my hands get really cold, so I'm thinking my next purchase will be heated gloves.

I have Warm and Safe gear, and it's good. I've also used Gerbings back when it was owned by the Gerbings. Since then they were bought by someone else and then they quit covering the old lifetime warranty claims and were pretty lousy to their customers claiming they were a completely new company (despite have the same name, logo, design, products, etc.), so I've boycotted them ever since.

As far as what to buy, I always recommend gloves first. Our extremities, particularly our fingers, are the first to get cold in the winter on a bike. You NEED dexterity in your fingers to safely ride. Also, when your hands are nice and toasty, it does wonders to make the rest of you feel warm. When I upgraded from heated grips to heated gloves, the difference was astounding. Heated grips are great (and I still have them on every bike I own), but they don't come close to the performance of a pair of good heated gloves.

It's also great to have a heated jacket liner to keep your core warm. Those two together will get you through some seriously tough cold weather.

This was about an hour into my ride on a very cold morning (in Fahrenheit).



I was nice and toasty with heated gloves, jacket, pants, and socks. I actually had to turn the heat down a few times so I didn't risk overheating and sweating in that cold. I think it eventually warmed up to close to 0° F that day. You get a lot of weird looks and people asking if you're cold riding in the winter. Little do they know how warm I actually am.

warm and safe..... https://www.warmnsafe.com

i have their jacket liner an had to disable the lower front elements, this jacket can get mighty warm. with the controller you dial up or down the amount of heat you need.

i will have to disagree with max384 above in that my hands are not the first thing to get uncomfortable (cold), its the spot between my shoulder blades and because of the large heated collar and generous upper back heat this is no longer a problem.

might look in to it , controlers are expensive , but u get 18% discount beeing AMA member

The stuff at Cycle Gear (Hotwired) works pretty good, their new line has built in controllers.

+10 on Warm n Safe stuff....especially the controllers. I won’t buy any Gerbings gear anymore ..... had several jacket/glove failures when sold to the next owner with minimal support.

Handle bar muffs are amazing.

Last year I wore summer gloves all winter. The heated hand grip and the muff was just amazing.

They really are amazing how warm they can keep your hands, even without heated grips... But I hate the bulk on the handlebars.

There are only a handful of manufacturer's. Several of the brand names are selling other people's gear with a different logo. e.g. I think CycleGear is the same as Tourmaster and Powerlet is the same as either Warm 'n Safe or Gerbing (I think.) I've tried a few and they all seem to work equally well. I had an old BMW vest that developed a hot spot on the lower front. It kept me warm and wide awake, squirming around, continually moving that hot spot about, for 800 miles in 45F rain on I-40. I didn't have it on a controller.

Agree about cold hands but would still say a jacket or vest is the most important. Don't bother getting one without the controller as most jackets are too much on maximum, unless it's VERY cold out.

Good info all around.
Like most things, gear will not save one if proper usage is not known. There is a learning process.
Go for a ride in cold temps and literally note what gets cold and how bad.
Assess how good your existing gear is. Can you seal up all the leaks? How warm does that make you? For how long?
A light down vest may be all you need for additional insulation? maybe you just need some decent long underwear?
Will your bike's charging system keep up with the load that your desired gear demands?
Good gloves and boots go a long way to keeping the rest of you warm such that sealing leaks and a decent vest/shirt is all you really need? At about 30F, I break out the sno-mobile boots for longer rides. Ergo, I don't need heated sox. Buy a large leather work glove and put a really warm but thin ski-glove inside.
My experience riding in chicagoland as long as traction permits (12 months but not every day) has me wishing for elec sleeves on my vest.
I found that I cannot live without a heated collar.
upsides are the near ecstasy of heated blanket cozy-ness which is immediately addicting and with which it is no longer possible to ride without. It is not for nothing that people will not buy vehicles unless they come with heated/chilled seats and a long list of creature comforts that in a previous generation were only dreams. You can take elec gear off at your destination and not overheat in clothes that you can't take off.
downsides to heated gear:
-if it fails for any reason, one counting on that gear to do the job totally will get cold immediately. Put the fuse where you can get at it immediately with near zero effort. Have plenty of fuses on the bike. If you carry 20-30 fuses, the original might never fail. 5 fuses may only tempt the gods to fack with you on the coldest ride ever.
-One should have a few of those newspaper flyers on the bike or know where to get them immediately if the gear fails. I have saved my frozen butt a lot of times with a few sheets of newspaper when the gear failed and I couldn't fix it in a McD's or in an all night laundry or until I got home.
Read the Jack London story "To Build a Fire". The guy dies due to a confluence of reasons.

Warm n safe. The owner is an Inmate here at advrider. Adv discount. Great products. I would never use anything else.

so with warm and safe should i go jacket liner or layer shirt ?

I find fingers and toes to freeze/ get cold first. But I generally am good about riding with a jacket, long sleeves, long pants and work boots. I wear thermals under my clothes when it gets colder (for Los Angeles!) and that gets me through most cold (er) days. It's long rides into the Central Valley where I really start to feel cold, you guessed it; fingers and toes.

Great advise has already been given. Ride wearing what you'd normally wear, assess, correct as necessary, ... ride, assess, correct, etc.

Get a long sleeve liner with a controller. I've had a Gerbings for a long time and it still works great!

I had heated gloves at one point in the past. They kept my hands plenty warm but were bulky and I was never 100% comfortable manipulating the throttle/front brake with them.
On my old zg1000, I had heated grips and hippo hands. This was excellent. I wore the same pair of light weight gloves year round. Even in below freezing weather doing 75 on the highway.

the only other thing I will add is that warm hands will not help your core body temperature. But a warm core will extend to your hands... to a degree.

a warm core is more important.

Depends on the individual. On me a warm core absolutely does NOT extend to the hands. For that matter, heated grips mean I have hot and sweaty palms (to an uncomfortable degree) while the back of my hands and my fingers are still frozen and numb.

I run a heated jacket, TourMaster Synergy 2.0, heated grips, and Koplin bar mitts (really cheap on Amazon) and I have no issues down top 10F. Would probably be fine below that, just never tried.
https://www.amazon.com/Kolpin-Geart...=1539706031&sr=8-1&keywords=koplin+geartector
I got my mitts for $9 on one of those super specials!