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[jotjotde]

Happy new year, everyone!

Winter has now started officially and I find myself wondering again why the grip heating of my Ribelle is so weak.

But maybe I have a dud one installed and a properly operating grip heating would be toasting my hands. Can anyone confirm this please?

[T.S. Zarathustra]

Happy new year.

Aluminium handlebars suck up lot of the heat from the grips. You need powerful grips to be roasting your hands with those.
I like to use Oxford V8 grips. They are 50 watts (28 w on the left, which is directly on the handlebar, 22 w on the right, which is on the throttle. This evens out the temperature). They also have auto shut off.
Most other are 30 watts (15 w each). So, Oxford 66% more powerful than most. I've seen some grips that are just over 20 w. You might have one of those.

Another possible cause is low voltage to the grips. If your grips are only getting 11 volts they will not heat as much as same grips getting 14 volts.
Yet another possible cause is bad connection to the bikes electrical system.

[Stonewolf]

The best piece of advice I can give for grip heaters is if your hands are in the wind they're useless. Ribelle has no wind protection for your hands and if you want grip heaters to work you need hand guards. Even cheapass ones from Amazon are fine if they're only deflecting the wind.

[chisquare]

I second Stonewolf’s point: hand guards make a huge difference. Heat loss on the upper side of the hands cannot be compensated for, even by the most powerful heated grips.

Regarding the power of Energica’s heated grips, the hottest spot on the fully powered grips of my SS9+ reaches about 51 °C, while most areas are closer to 40 °C. This is considerably less than what I experience with the heated grips on my R1300GS. I could not measure their temperature, as they are only functional with the engine running, which I did not want to do in my garage for the time required for the grips to fully heat up.

[Pard]

I believe the issue is that the output to the heated grips is only 12V.  In an ice bike you get 14V.  Makes a huge difference with heated clothing and heated grips in terms of performance.  There should have been a seperate circuit that was available for heated externals that supplied 15V. 

I use a stand alone battery that fits in my suit and outputs 15V constant at full power for an hour with head to toe heated gear.

Try powering the grips with a 14-15 v source, i bet they will get as hot as they do on gas bikes.

[svelectric]

May be a different setup on the Experia.  My heated grips get toasty even on chilly days.  Albeit, I don't ride below 32ish. 

[ESokoloff]

Do you have the means to check voltage @ the heaters & amp draw(s)?
Are the grips resistants the same & heat temperature at standstill the same?

[PWM]

Confirm temperature setting, grip indicator will show (3) dots on max.

[Specter]

Not trying to be a smart ass, but go into your settings, you can select how strong your grips are on.  Id go with the medium setting, the high can acutally almost burn you after a while.  Make sure you have them turned on at a higher setting.  If they are on low, yah they are pretty puny.

Also, what the others have said, in open air, it's about worthless.  Even with gloves it helps a bit, some kind of guard is best to keep the wind off your hands, and rain, and and and, but leather gloves help if nothing else.   they'll bring the heat in and help keep it in your hands, but yah, the palm of your hand is toasty, the tops, frosty.  not overly helpful, but i tell ya, i turned them on on my track bike and ooh man, toasty grips on a 36 degree day were heavenly. too bad you can't heat a tire on the move the same way !!

aaron.

[ultrarnr]

I have heated grips on my Ribelle RS and they are really lame. High is the only setting I have ever used because I don't think you could tell they were even on at a lower setting.

[Specter]

now this is interesting.  both my heated grips bikes, they take a few minutes to get up to temp, but get very hot.
are any of the connections loose maybe, where it plugs in at, if that's loose, that could cause big problems.

just seems strange.  are you able to get to them and get a resistance reading across them?  im really curious why there are some crappy, and some good ones, and is it a defect, or loose wires or what, because i mean, it's a piece of resistive wire, nothing that complicated or am i missing something?

aaron

[Demoni]

The heated grips on Energica bikes are mounted to plastic selves to insulate the grip from the aluminum bars, reducing thermal energy loss. The same grips are used on a number of Ducati and MV models, from my experience the grips on these bikes get warmer than those on Energica.

It all comes down to voltage. Energica provides 12V to it's 12V systems (lighting, grips) vs the 14.5V most stators on ICE bikes produce.
If you run a set of grips rated for 10W @ 14.5V but only provide them with 12V or power they actually only produce 8W of heat, 20% less than at 14.5V.

You could step up the voltage provided to the grips using a DC-DC Buck converter. This would allow you to tune the output voltage to 14.5. This would cause the circuit to draw more amps, not sure if that would result in a fault.

[jotjotde]

Thanks to all for your input! I did not expect so many answers.

Reading this I fail to understand the differing experiences with our grip heatings.

E.g. while Chisqaure reports a whopping 51 degree C (!), some others (like me) report the grips being lukewarm in maximum (and yes, the grip heating is set at maximum i.e. 3 dots).

That's intriguing 

[dby]

Another data point in case useful - my Ribelle has the factory-fit heated grips and I thought they were great - I found them plenty hot enough on setting 1 (of 3). I'm comparing them with factory-fit Triumph Tiger Sport heated grips (borderline not warm enough even on setting 2 of 2) and self-fitted Oxford grips on a Daytona (plenty warm enough, rarely set above 40-60%).

I do also have the factory hand guards option on the Ribelle but I tend to take them off once the weather gets warmer.

Certainly sounds like some variability!