Frozen Digits, Heated Grips and the Oxford Junction Box

VIDEO: I've made a video of the entire process, scroll to the bottom to see it.

I first tried heated grips on a motorbike back at the start of 2025. I was taking lessons in Northern Ireland to get my full A motorbike licence and it was the middle of January. For those not familiar with the local climate, January in NI is "baltic." My instructor and I were halfway through a two-hour lesson, and I had to stop because I could no longer feel my fingers.

My instructor shouted, "Get your hands around my grips, that’ll warm them up."

At this point, I wasn’t entirely sure if this was a teaching moment or a proposition. Thankfully, he quickly cleared things up by adding, "My handlebar grips are heated." Ah. Right. That makes sense. Phew!

Five minutes later my hands were toasty, and I decided there and then that the first upgrade I was getting once I got my NI motorbike was heated grips.

Fast forward to May when I picked up the Piaggio Beverly 350. I immediately went shopping for some heated grips and managed to snag a bargain set of new Oxford Essential Hotgrips. They are designed specifically for maxi-scooters and small-engined motorbikes, drawing only 4 amps max. They were the perfect choice, helped along by the fact the retailer was clearing them out at only £20 a set. Bargain!

But nobody needs heated grips in Spring, so after testing they worked on a spare battery, I threw them in a drawer until I had the time and the know-how to install them properly. Over the preceding summer, I did my research and watched plenty of online "how-to" videos.

The Wiring Dilemma

The first thing I realised was that despite the instructions from Oxford, you really shouldn’t wire them straight to the battery. If you do that, it's a sure-fire guarantee that one day you will forget to turn them off and come back to a dead bike with a flat battery.

Most people advise splicing them into the wiring for the main headlight, but that felt like a bodge to me. If the grips threw a wobbly and blew a fuse, it would take out my headlight too. Losing your lights at 60mph on a dark country road is a pretty serious safety issue that I’d rather avoid!

So after some more digging, I worked out I should wire them to the battery via a relay that is wired to the ignition. This was getting complicated. What the hell is a "relay"? I had no clue, so I kept looking.

Enter the Oxford Junction Box

Then I discovered a clever little bit of kit called the Oxford Junction Box. It is essentially a remote fuse box that takes power directly from the battery and serves it out to up to four individually fused accessories.

The clever bit is that as well as the two heavy cables to the battery, it also has a third "trigger" wire. You connect this trigger to something that is only "live" when the bike is turned on. When the trigger detects power, it tells the box to wake up and supply power to the accessories connected to it. Clever. So I bought one and threw it in the drawer along with the grips. It would be months before I actually needed the heat, so I figured I could take my time to plan the install.

Location, Location, Location

Where to put the grips was obvious, but where is the best place to put the junction box? The obvious place is next to the battery under the seat. But I figured most of the accessories I’d be wanting to connect to it in the future would be at the front. Like the grips, maybe some aux lights, or a GPS. If I put the box near the battery, every time I wanted to add a gadget to the front I’d have to strip down all the side panels to run new cables.

I decided the best place to locate the junction box was at the front of the bike, and the glove box was the obvious candidate.

The glove box on the Beverly is uselessly small. You can’t even fit a modern smartphone in there, so it is entirely dead space. Plus, there was already a factory USB connector inside it that was only live when the bike was on. That was my trigger wire sorted. All I had to do was run the main power cables back to the battery.

The Install

The Junction Box is designed for motorbikes where the battery sits under the tank, not scooters where the battery is under your bum. This means the supplied cables are hilariously short. So the first job was to extend them. And since the cables were now almost a metre long running from the battery compartment under the seat, down into the footwell, up behind the nose cone, and into the glovebox, the live cable absolutely had to have its own fuse right near the battery terminal.

So, on a cold and gloomy evening between Christmas and New Year, I was in the garage with the soldering iron. The next day, armed with my newly lengthened cables and Junction Box, I stripped the entire plastic trim off one side and the front end. Several hours later, phase one was done. The bike was in bits, but the Junction Box was installed. I mounted it inside its own watertight plastic container (since the glovebox isn’t actually watertight) and tucked it into the cubby hole on the righthand side.

Battery connected, ignition to ON... The lights on the Junction Box flickered to life. Success! But it had now been well over five hours since I’d had a mince pie and Baileys, so I called it a day and headed inside to the warm.

Fitting the Grips

The next day I stripped the plastics off the bars, removed the headlight, removed the old rubber grips, installed the new heated ones, and carefully wired them into the newly installed Junction Box.

I was expecting the installation of the grips themselves to be the hard part, but that all went fine. The headache was finding somewhere in the tight space behind the handlebar plastic trim to hide all the excess cabling.

After a couple of attempts, it all came together beautifully. I mounted the grips control switch (On, High, Low) to the small plastic trim piece that sits just above the instrument cluster. It’s not the most obvious place to put it, but I didn’t want to drill holes in the expensive main dash. This way, if I (or the next owner) decide to remove the grips, all we have to do is replace one small bit of plastic trim, available from EasyParts for £12, and there will be no random holes left on the dash.

The Verdict

All that was left was the first test. Bike fired up, grips to High, and I set off. Even wearing my thick winter Tucano Urbano gloves I could feel the heat almost immediately. Lovely. Then it went from lovely to "wow, this is warm." Then my hands started to get clammy.

I knocked the heat setting down to Low... Perfect. It was a relatively mild day (about 10°C), so getting good heat on the low setting boded well for the proper cold days.

And those days came sooner than expected. The very next day I set off at 10am for a long trip to the city with the thermometer reading 2°C. I’m pleased to say that with some alternating between High and Low, my hands stayed toasty all day, even on a long fast motorway stretch. I reckon I can now save my winter gloves for the absolute worst days and use my "all season" gloves the rest of the time.

So, another successful project completed on the NI Beverly 350. I’ve got the all-important heat, and the next project, which is likely going to be some auxiliary lights because the stock headlights are absolute rubbish, should be a doddle thanks to that Junction Box.

Watch the Video

See the full install process here: