An auto belay is a drum of webbing on the ceiling that takes in the slack as you climb and lowers you gently when you let go. It logs every cycle because every cycle is wear. Ours cycles at night. The webbing pays out to the top of the wall, holds there, and comes back in at the speed it lowers a person.
I look after the climbing wall at a leisure centre, and the thing I look after most is the auto belay.
What it is.
A drum on the ceiling with twelve metres of webbing on it, and a brake inside it. You clip the webbing to your harness, you climb, it takes in the slack as you go. You let go at the top and it lowers you at walking pace. It is the thing that lets a person climb with nobody holding a rope for them, and because it is the thing that stops a person falling, it counts its cycles, and every cycle is in the log, and at a set number it goes back to the manufacturer.
A cycle is webbing out to a height and back in.
The log shows cycles at night.
Between midnight and one, most nights, one or two. Each one pays out to about eleven metres, which is the top of the wall, holds there for the few seconds a person takes to look at the view and let go, and comes back in at the lowering speed, which is the speed it only uses when there is a weight on it. Pulled out empty and let go, the webbing comes back fast. It comes back slow.
What has been checked.
The unit. Sent back early, at my insistence, opened by the manufacturer, found to be in perfect order, and returned, and the night cycles resumed the first night it was back up.
The wall. There is a camera on the wall. On the camera, at about midnight, the webbing pays out from the drum, clip end first, up the wall, at a climbing pace, with the small pauses of a person choosing a hold, along the route we call the blue, which is a grade 5 and is the route most people take first. At the top it holds. Then it comes down slowly, swinging the small amount a person swings, and the clip touches the mat and lies there and is taken back in.
Nothing is on it.
The mat.
The mat at the bottom is a thick crash mat and when a person lands on it, it keeps the shape for a second. On the camera, when the clip reaches the mat, the mat takes a shape, two feet, the width of a person standing, and lets it go.
What I have done.
I took the webbing off the drum one night and left the drum bare. The drum logged a cycle, at eleven metres, with nothing on it to pay out.
I put the webbing back. I do not think it was a kindness to take it off.
What is done about it.
The cycles are counted. The unit is on a schedule to go back for service at a number, and the night cycles mean it goes back sooner than it should, and I have raised it as a cost and the manager has asked me to find the fault, and the manufacturer has found no fault, twice, and I have stopped raising it.
What I do.
I look after the wall.
The blue route has a hold near the top that I had been meaning to change, a small crimp that is hard for the size of hand most beginners have, and I left it because the route was popular.
I changed it last week for a bigger hold, because the pauses on the camera, the climbing pauses, were longest at that crimp, every night, a long hang on a small hold eleven metres up, and the night after I changed it the pause was gone, and the cycle was smoother, and I felt, and I am saying this as the person who is paid to keep people from falling off that wall, that I had helped somebody, and I do not know who, and I do not think they come down when the webbing does.