Power play: How to hard-wire heated motorcycle gloves into your bike

Heated kit is a brilliant addition to your winter riding kit. It allows you to wear less insulating clothing and instead, generate heat to maintain your body temperature while remaining comfortable and in clothing that isn’t too bulky. If you put in a lot of miles in the cold, you can hard-wire heated motorcycle gloves to the battery.

One of the first bits of heated kit people usually choose is a pair of heated gloves. The hands can be very exposed and fingertips and the back of the hand won’t be kept warm by heated grips. But this guide is equally applicable to other items like socks, trousers and vests.

Many heated gloves come with batteries, but housing these in pouches somewhere on the glove – usually around the cuff – can make them bulky and uncomfortable, depending on how you wear your gloves and jacket cuffs.

MCN’s Saffron Wilson tested the Keis G701 heated gloves:

Battery power also has a finite life and if you’re on a long or multi-day ride, and need them on more than one day, you could run out of power or have to charge them overnight.

The answer for many is to connect the heated kit – which can include gloves but also vests, jacket and socks – to the bike’s battery using an appropriate hard-wire kit. This means that you can run your heated kit at whatever level you want, safe in the knowledge that the energy won’t run out at any point. Here’s our guide to hard-wire heated motorcycle gloves.

Step 1:

Start by using the key to remove the seat. On our Himalayan, it nestled between the pannier mount and the seat on the left-hand side, under the front of the pillion pad

Step 2:

The pillion seat comes off first, followed by…

Step 3:

…the rider’s seat, revealing the fusebox, relays and the battery.

Step 4:

Here is the Enfield’s battery, tucked away to the side of the area with the familiar cover over the positive terminal.

Step 5:

This shows how to hard-wire heated motorcycle gloves. But most clothing will come with the same; a harness to go on the bike and one to go in the clothing to connect to it.

Step 6:

The bike harness comes with pre-fitted ring terminals and an inline fuse holder. We left the fuse-holder empty at this stage.

Step 7:

We started by fitting the earth terminal. The screw holding the main terminal to the battery was tight but not overly so.

Step 8:

With the retaining screw removed, we held the terminal onto the battery so there was no interruption to power for the bike, so we didn’t have to reset the clock, for example, or disturb any electronics.

Step 9:

We fitted the retaining screw to the terminal with the flat side of the harness terminal against the battery and started the screw back into the captive nut in the battery’s terminal.

Step 10:

Once we were sure the screw had started properly (make sure you don’t cross-thread it here) we tightened the screw down fully.

Step 11:

To get to the positive terminal of the battery, you need to move the cover to the side, exposing the screw. Be careful not to touch any bodywork with the shaft of the screwdriver when removing this screw.

Step 12:

We repeated the process from the earth terminal with the positive on the battery, with the harness connector flat-side down and tightened the screw.

Step 13:

We routed the harness cable so that the cover over the battery’s positive terminal could be refitted in the right place to protect it.

Step 14:

The harness has plenty of length to it, allowing you to position the connector plug wherever you want.

Step 15:

We tend to prefer the connector at the front of the seat area, so it is easier to connect to the garment wiring at the hem of the jacket.

Step 16:

The wiring kit we used came with a bag of fuses and no real indication on which to use, so we went for 5 amp, to begin with. This gives good protection but isn’t so low it trips when the gloves are on full power.

Step 17:

Once we’d finished, all that is visible to the outside world is the connector socket at the front of the seat. There is plenty of slack inside so that it can be pulled out as required.

Step 18:

Now it’s time to fit the harness to the jacket, to carry power from the connector on the bike to the gloves themselves.

Step 19:

We usually feed the main connector plug on the jacket through a drawstring fastener at the hem, so that it keeps it in place.

Step 20:

We pulled the drawstring fastener tight to keep a decent grip on the cable so it can be pulled out if necessary to meet the connector on the bike but will also keep the cable out of the way if you’re not using the electrical heating.

Step 21:

The other end of the jacket harness is a pair of connectors, one designed to go down each sleeve to the cuff, for connecting to the respective glove.

Step 22:

Start by feeding a cable down each sleeve, between the thermal liner and the jacket outer.

Step 23:

Put your hand up each sleeve and grab the connector, gently pulling it out until it emerges from the cuff.

Step 24:

So that the cables don’t end up retracting themselves into the sleeve and you lose them, we usually run them through one of the popper loops used to hold the thermal liner into the sleeve of the outer. Choose the best position to hard-wire heated motorcycle gloves. On ours, they were at the bottom of the wrist.

Step 25:

Now time to connect it all up to make sure it works. Start by sitting on the bike and pulling some of the bike’s harness out and plugging the jacket into the socket.

Step 26:

Then do the same with each glove; it may be a bit fiddly but a little extra cable may help. Before you set off, make sure you tuck any excess cable out of the way, so it won’t interfere with your riding.

Step 27:

There you go – ready to head off into whatever the elements have in store for you with warm fingers and hands.

More heated gloves we’ve tested:

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