A safety harness is a full body harness which is used when working at height, safety harnesses come in a range of different colours and styles. A safety harness is designed to be used alongside lanyards such as fall arrest lanyards, restraint lanyard and work positioning lanyards to make sure you are working at heights safety.
Safety harnesses have connection points which allow you to attach these lanyards, choosing the number of connection points is all part of how to choose the right safety harness which we will discuss later.
A safety harness is typically made of polyester webbing and alloy steel designed to strap around the front of your body, over the shoulders and around the legs.
Here is a image on the right of a Portwest safety harness.
What are the different types of safety harnesses?
Safety harnesses come is a wide range of different options to make sure you can get the correct harness for your team. This is important as we are all different shapes and sizes, although the different types of safety harnesses don’t stop at size, there are numerous differential features from harness to harness.
Colour
Sizes
Connection points
Padding
Buckle fastening points
Materials
Based on the number of different variations this means there are hundreds of options you can choose from, all coming from different manufactures and having different performance levels.
Making sure you have the correct safety harness is essential and we will discuss how to choose the right safety harness below.
How to choose the right safety harness?
When looking to buy the best safety harness for you and your team, it can be tricky to decide on one style, brand and colourway.
It’s important to consider what is needed from this harness and carrying out a risk assessment is always a good place to start. Once a need has been discovered here are the steps to take regarding selecting the right safety harness.
Connection points:
Making sure you consider the way you will use a safety harness is key, are you looking to work in fall arrest, work in restraint or work in a fixed position. This is important to know as this will determine the amount of connection points you need.
For example, if you are working in fall arrest it is likely that 1 connection point at the rear is suitable as when you work in fall arrest this is protecting you if you fall off the structure you are on, the lanyard will be come into action by stopping you reaching the floor.
Size:
Making sure you have the correct size is more important than just the wearer comfort levels, it is important to have a safety harness fastened correctly and tight.
Imagine you are working in fall arrest and fall off a structure with a loose-fitting harness, the delay in the harness tightening when falling will cause a sharp and sudden tightening once you reach the remaining area of harness. This has caused serious injury across the industry.
Make sure you take the time to measure each employee before issuing a safety harness, all manufactures will be able to provide a size guide to support this decision.
Colour:
Less importantly compared to the others, choosing the correct colour would be the last step to take. With a wide variety of safety harnesses in the marketplace you can usually find a harness which matches your company colours. Of course, this is not essential and just an extra step to consider if keeping your team unified is a key element to your business.
How to put of your safety harness?
This is a task which is often considered to be obvious and easy to do, however putting on a safety harness as mentioned above can have catastrophic results if done incorrectly. In a lot of our training courses we have noticed that most people don’t know which way is the correct way up when handed a safety harness and it’s easy to understand why.
Rather than trying to explain this in writing, this task is best explained on video.
See the below video showing how to don a safety harness on youtube!
In this video they discuss the essential need of fitting a harness correctly and why this is important.
For more information on working at height safety and the different ways to work at height take a look at our height safety blog.
If you need any height safety equipment in the future, consider OAKEYS Safety Ltd where we have a wide range of safety harnesses and lanyards on our online store.
