Nearly eight years ago, in its Z359.14 Safety Requirements for Self-Retracting Devices standard, ANSI divided self-retracting lifelines (SRLs) into two classes, Class A and Class B. Although it’s been close to a decade, based on many of the technical questions we receive from the field, there is still some misunderstanding as to what these classes mean and how they apply to the real-world situations workers at height find themselves in every day.
There are two primary, measurable components that define an SRL’s performance during the arrest of a fall: the distance within which the SRL arrests the fall, and the forces generated during the arrest.