Drag Specialties Heated Grips

4. The left grip was then slid into the control housing, and then we tightened up the left and right side control housings. The left side grip has an external wire lead (main harness) that was routed along the handlebars and down to the tank. The lead was then fed underneath the tank to the battery box.

5. After removing the seat we disconnected the negative battery terminal. Depending on your specific setup the final wiring may vary. The instructions directed us to attach the supplied red extension wire with the inline fuse box (A) to the red wire of the main harness. Then use the supplied connector (B) to fasten the red extension wire to the 12v accessory wire. Then to ground, we attached the black extension wire (C) to the black wire of the main harness and then fastened the terminal to the negative battery post.

6. To make installation easy, the red extension wire has a female terminal and the black extension wire has a male terminal. Therefore we just connected the terminals accordingly into the main harness.

7. The left side has the controller to operate the grips. There are four settings on the dial. The dial turns clockwise. The first setting is the off position (seen here), next is the low setting, then medium heat, and finally the highest heat setting.

8. As you can see, the dial has a slightly raised tab so that you can easily operate the system with gloves on.

9. According to the directions, the grips have a draw of 15.5 wattt/2.6 amps at the lowest setting, 23.3 watts/3.8 amps at the mid setting, and 34.4 watts/5.7 amps at the highest setting. We wanted to see how hot the grips got so grabbed our infrared thermometer, put the grips on the highest setting and took a reading. Our thermometer came back with a read out of 141 degrees Fahrenheit.

10. At that temperature it was a little too hot to handle without gloves for more than a couple seconds (the lower settings were more manageable without gloves).

11. However, with gloves on, we could feel how the highest setting would be beneficial once we were actually riding in the freezing temps, especially when we factored in the wind-chill of cruising at 60-plus mph.