I added a battery tender lead to the bike the other day. The purpose was twofold. One, if there’s a long stretch where I won’t be running the bike, I’ll plug in, and two, I wanted the option for heated gear. Today I got the chance to try the latter. Part of the reason I chose the SP was for the 660 Watt generator. I figure it should be able to handle heated gear, especially if I run led lights (which hasn’t successfully yet). Today I did a quick dust off of the driveway, which turned into a not so quick dust off of two neighbors driveways as well. Anyway, after my driveway, my finger tips were frozen, even with some decent heavy gloves. I figured today was as good a day as any to see how the heated gear worked on the new bike. I warmed up my hands indoors and tossed on my Gerbings liner and Gerbings G3 gloves.

Backround – I use the heated gear for my motorcycle trips. Even in the summer, if you are out west and in the mountains, it can get cold. As such, it’s always on the bike. It works great too. We’ve ridden in the teens and while I won’t say we were toasty, we didn’t die of exposure. That said, the G3s are the weak link. They get warm, but not hot. On the bike at 75 MPH in 28 degree weather, they maintain enough warmth so as not to be uncomfortable though. So I was hoping on the atv they would work in the much colder 3 degree temps I was plowing in because of less wind.

Well I’m happy to say they did work! I went from freezing hands to warm hands just like that. I had the jacket liner down very low as my body maintains heat pretty well. What a difference it made! I could have stayed on that thing all day. I had the lights off, but was working the winch here and there for plowing. The low charge light never came on at all.

So all in all a success. I’m confident that on trails with (led) lights on, running at higher sustained RPMs, the heated gear will work just as well.