Handwarmers S05E02 Heated Gloves PT II
Channel: Mountain Parameters
Date: 2020-12-21

In Part I, we determined that heated gloves that cannot develop more than 12 watts of energy are not very effective. 12 Watts is not enough to heat your hands in a meaningful way when you work or recreate outdoors in locations where winter is more than an inconvenient hiatus from the Golf Course. When I watch other subjective reviews of heated gloves, if they do not express the capacity of the gloves to provide energy measured in Watts (or at least volts and current draw, so I can calculate the watts myself), I'm left scratching my head as to why they bothered to make a video in the first place. If your fingers got cold while flying your ultralight over a duck pond in Minnesota, it says very little to me, and may not to you either. There is no nice outdoor scenery in this episode, just a workbench surface covered with a cutting board, and drab commentary expressing quantitative metrics that may put you to sleep.

Costco sells heated work gloves in Canada for $99.00 CAD. We didn't expect them to exceed our expectations, and they didn't. But the form factor caught our attention as something that has the potential to be greatly improved with a few simple hacks from a DIY project.

That project involved building a better battery pack with more capacity and higher voltage that would give us 25 watts of energy in the gloves. The resultant battery hits the scales at 6 ounces. At double the weight of the original, we do find we also get double the heat however.

As the battery pocket is also well situated for placement of a liquid fuel handwarmer, we'll be exploring that possibility in PT III of this series with some field testing once our local weather turns colder.

Timeline:
00:00 Introduction, review of Part I. Review of how to evaluate battery capacity, heat, and final verdict of the stock version of the gloves.
01:45 Comparison of OEM and new DIY battery packs. Differences enumerated. The importance of voltage and how other brands may misrepresent battery pack capacity.
03:30 Measuring the amp draw (current) of the new battery pack and comparing it to the previous draw of the OEM pack.
05:30 Start of time lapse temperature test. Probe is placed in finger at the same point as the previous test in E01. After initial temperature is achieved, ice packs are used to simulate outdoor conditions.
06:10 Without the ice packs, the temperature hits 100C. Then Ice packs are applied and test resumed. In the time lapse, we see average temp for most of the test was around 75C.
06:30 Test ends at about the 2 hr mark when batteries shut down.
07:00 Discussing the weight to energy yield trade off.
08:15 Placing the battery packs on the scale and comparing weight
09:20 Measuring and comparing battery pack dimensions
09:45 Discussion of the results of the new battery end. From this point on, we look at how to build the battery pack.
09:50 Start time lapse showing the construction of a new battery pack from start to finish.
11:10 Discussion on using the gloves with the new amounts of available heat. Will they last longer now?
11:40 What if you are still out, it's freezing, and your batteries die?
12:45 Preview: Handwarmers and gloves, what are we going to look at in Episode III as your alternative to using batteries in the glove's battery compartment so you can still keep your hands warm?
14:30 End roll, disclaimer, contact info