Tested: Furygan Heat Blizzard heated gloves review

Date reviewed: November 2020 | Tested by: John Milbank | Price: £249.99 | www.nevis.uk.com

The Furygan Heat Blizzard heated gloves on review here are unique due to their clever Bluetooth connection system. This is more than just a gimmick, and though it’s neat to have your gloves preheat themselves, that’s not what makes them some of the best heated gloves we’ve tried.

While the price is pretty high, it’s important to note that they do include batteries, so that puts them at pretty much the same RRP as the new Keis G701s if you buy the optional battery pack. There is a but though…

I’ve been testing these gloves on my BMW S1000XR and the Royal Enfield Interceptor 650, as well as several bench-tests to find out how well they really perform.

Fit and feel

Fit is of course subjective, so always try any bike kit on before you buy, but I found the Furygan Heat Blizzards to be very comfortable – with a good finger length – in my usual glove size of large.

The supplied batteries do add bulk to the top of the cuff, but I found that by putting each in shortest side first – so their length runs down the wrist, rather than across it – they felt a little less chunky. That’s not to say they’re uncomfortable at all, but the cuff can wrap around the wrist a little better this way.

Impressively, the design of the cuff means that, even with the batteries fitted, I can get the gloves under the sleeves of my Rukka Navigattor jacket – if you can do this, you’ll find they stay a lot drier, though of course the control buttons do disappear under the sleeve too.

The gloves have a large coverage of grippy panels on the palms, reducing the chances of slipping on the handlebars in the wet, while the index finger tips are surprisingly effective with phone touch-screens.

Temperature

Measuring the temperature of any heated kit is tricky as it depends on exactly where the thermal probe is positioned, as well as the ambient temperature and your speed. The graph below is based on testing indoors without the gloves being worn, and is really intended as a guide to battery life.

The fact that these gloves achieved temperatures of up to 85°C in my testing doesn’t mean they’re going to burn your hands, and they haven’t caused me problems in my testing on the road. It will of course depend on the weather conditions, and Super Boost mode (which is only accessible by using the optional power cable to connect these to your bike battery) can indeed get very hot, but the idea is to get the heat into the gloves quickly, before you turn the power down to a lower level.

While temperatures haven’t hit sub-zero yet, I will be using these gloves through the winter, and will update if any of my findings vary, but at around 6°C the Furygan’s worked brilliantly, with me keeping them in High and Medium modes for my 90 minute ride. Once home, there was still 54% of battery charge left.

Heated gloves feel great at first, then after a while you tend to wonder if they’re still working. But stop and take them off (for instance to write notes for the product review) and you suddenly realise just how effective they are.

The main heat is initially felt on the backs of the hands, but this soon spreads to the fingers and thumbs; it was my thumbs on the Royal Enfield – which doesn’t have handguards to deflect the wind – that took the longest to warm up, but not wearing these would have made the ride far less enjoyable.

Low power mode does put some heat out, and it can prolong higher temperatures established by the more powerful modes, but even at 8°C ambient temperature (before wind-chill), I found it was just too low to be of any use.

My testing indoors doesn’t give a true indication of the temperatures you’ll achieve on the road, but it does show the battery life, and the relative performance of each setting

Power

As standard, the Furygan Heat Blizzard gloves are supplied with a pair of 7.4V 2,200mAh batteries, as well as a dedicated mains charger. For many riders, this will be all they need as even in the highest Boost mode that the batteries allow, you’ll get just under two hours and ten minutes of power.

In my testing, High mode gave just under two and a half hours, while Medium extends it to three hours and forty minutes.

The gloves can connect to a well-designed app on your smartphone, which allows you to choose the power outputs for each mode. These are the defaults, but you can set them to be whatever you want:

Super Boost mode delivers a 120% output thanks to the fact that it converts the bike battery’s output to 9V at 3A. In fact, this cable will work with anything from 11V to 27V, pulling 2.1A, so it’ll have no problems dealing with the 14 or so Volts your bike’s charging circuit supplies.

Three red LEDs on each glove show the power output, with flashing patterns for Boost and Super Boost. There’s also a blue LED that illuminates when you open the app on your phone, and a green/red LED that gives battery status.

In the chart above, ‘Low batt 1’ shows when the green LED started flashing, which indicates when the charge dropped below 30%. ‘Low batt 2’ was when the LED started flashing red, which means there’s less than 5% left. To prolong the life of the battery packs, it’s advised to charge them before this point, though the packs do of course have a protection circuit built into each, so they won’t discharge to a dangerous or unrecoverable state.]

Charging takes up to four hours from completely flat.

Control

The control of the Furygan Heat Blizzards is where the true genius lies. While connecting to your phone might seem a bit of a gimmick, it’s the fact that the gloves connect to each other that I love. Put simply, turn either one on and the other powers up by itself. Change the mode and the other follows. That means you never have to let go of the throttle to adjust the left glove; you can do it all on the right, with your left hand, while riding.

The app – I’m using it on a Samsung Galaxy S10, but there is an iOS version too – aloows you to check the exact level of each battery’s charge, change the output levels for each mode and schedule when you want them to warm up.

Yes… you can set a scheduled time and day that you’ll be using these gloves, and they’ll automatically turn themselves on and run in Boost mode for five minutes before that time, then turn themselves off again.

Given how quickly the gloves warm up anyway, this is a bit of a novelty, but I have to admit that it is great to be able to slip on a pair of warm gloves before getting on the bike of a cold morning.

You can’t set a specific date – only a day, so that means you can only set a single event from any of the seven days – but realistically you’ll be most likely to be setting it for a time on the same day (going home perhaps), or for the next morning. If you unplug the batteries, the schedule will be forgotten, but it’s clever that this schedule is stored in the gloves – you don’t need to keep the phone nearby to turn them on once the schedule is set.

Note that with the batteries plugged in, these gloves are always in standby mode, so will draw power over time thanks to the Bluetooth always ‘listening’ for a connection to the phone. In my testing, they tend to lose about five percent of charge a day, so if you’re not using them, it’s worth unplugging them.

As utterly brilliant as the control of these gloves is, I do wish that Furygan had fitted the control button to the top of the hand, rather than the cuff – that way I could have tucked them under my jacket’s sleeves while riding.

Protection and certification

The Furygan Heat Blizzards are tested to EN 13594:2015 – as all motorcycle gloves legally should be – and also feature soft knuckle protectors that are rated as armour.

There’s also some padding on the little fingers, and the palms are reinforced. Overall construction is goat leather.

From April 21 2018, all new motorcycle clothing is deemed to be Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). To meet this legislation, it must be tested to a recognised standard. For more information on the law, click here.

Fastening

The Heat Blizzards feature a wrist restraint and a cuff fastener; I’m able to cinch down the cuff well, either over or under my jacket’s sleeves (though check your jacket as they won’t all have space for these underneath), but the wrist strap – while nicely made with a self-closing elastic strap and impossible to pull through the buckle – isn’t quite as secure as I’d like – it is possible to pull the gloves off my hand, even with it as tight as it’ll go.

There are elastic loops hanging out of the cuffs that might make you look like a toddler with them dangling off your arms, but they’re much appreciated when paying for fuel.

Wet weather use

The Furgan Heat Blizzards haven’t let any water in during my rides, but if you have them outside of your jacket’s cuffs, like most gloves water will find its way down your arm and into them. The soft lining soaks this up quickly, keeping them damp, so the ideal is always to tuck them under your jacket’s sleeves if possible.

Once the liner gets wet, it holds the moisture for a long time and grabs at your skin, making the gloves really difficult to take off; this is a particular worry as you can feel it wanting to let go of the outer shell so be very careful.

The RST Paragon battery-powered gloves have a drawstring that pulls an inner liner tight against your jacket’s sleeve. It’s not 100% effective, and they’re harder to get under a jacket, but it does help keep them dry inside.

The thumb features a well-shaped, if slightly small visor wipe that certainly helps when it comes to removing that quick-drying muddy spray that’s so common in winter.

Lining

The lining is cosy and soft, though as with many gloves it’s only tacked in place at the extremities, so you do need to be careful when pulling them off (the Keis G701s have a fully-bonded liner). This is a bug-bear of many riders, but it’s only really an issue on these if your hands are wet – when dry the gloves tend to slide off easily.

The Heat Blizzards feature 37.5 techology, which is claimed to help keep your body at its ideal 37.5°C core temperature by removing sweat while it’s still a vapour, thus cooling you down. When you’re cold, it’s claimed that the particles that make this happens – made from microporous volcanic sand – trap your body heat to help warm you up.

Does it work? Well, I haven’t found the gloves make my hands sweaty yet – only rain getting in has made them wet so far. Perhaps those volcanic particles explain why the gloves take so long to dry when the inside is soaked.

I can’t comment on whether the tech really helps keep me warm as that’s difficult to see without a direct comparison, but with the heating elements turned off, I have used warmer winter gloves. Power them up though and these things excel.

Why have heated gloves if your bike has heated grips?

Heated grips can only warm the palm and insides of your fingers, so as the wind blows over the tops of your hands you’ll be losing heat.

Pairing heated gloves with heated grips gives you the best warmth possible. Combined with hand-guards to deflect the wind, the only way you’ll get any warmer is to go full-courier and fit some bar muffs.

The optional power cable is compatible with Keis connectors to feed it from the battery

Furygan Heat Blizzard heated gloves review: Verdict

Most buyers of these gloves will be using them with the supplied batteries, so the £69.99 RRP of the optional power lead will not be an issue. While it does have a voltage regulator built into the lead to step it down to 9V, this still does seem very expensive, but it’s worth noting that the fly-lead section that connects to the bike’s battery terminates with the same connector as that used by Keis, so you could combine these gloves with a Keis heated jacket, for instance. In fact, you could even plug the lead that takes power to the gloves (and includes the regulator) into your Keis jacket or vest, so you’ll still only need one supply cable coming from your bike. You’ll still need to buy the Furygan lead, but it’s great to find it directly compatible with Keis.

Ultimately, I personally don’t like using wired heated gloves as I just find them a bit of a pain running the cables through my jacket’s arms. Battery-powered gloves are awesome though, and while I have serious reservations about using these in the rain, they really do mean that I can enjoy far more rides during the icy-cold – but dry – winter weekends.

Anybody who’s fiddled around trying to adjust the output on their left glove while riding will appreciate just what a big deal the genius control method is on these. The Furygan Heat Blizzards aren’t perfect, but for dry rides of a couple of hours or less, they’re a very good option.