New Petzl belay device

Pat Lightwrote:

This is an extremely generous statement, by which I mean it is outright delusional — just completely untethered from objective reality

Why? This was my first thought about its advantage over the standard gri gri. It will likely be counter-indicated in the IFU and anyways if it goes wrong rope soloing….you’ll be dead. You sorta missed the grim humor of the statement.

I've been using the NEOX for a few weeks now. My thoughts are here: https://youtu.be/ETKWlKkzyHI

The short version is I think it's pretty good. I wouldn't expect happy GriGri users to switch, but I think it will appeal to many others.

Oh it’s definitely going to get used for, or at least experimented with, rope soloing. And when it doesn’t execute flawlessly, which it won’t as that’s not the designed intent, Petzl won’t escape being blamed unfairly.  No offense to the LRS/TRS community, I’m a member of said community…  but there will certainly be b!tching and moaning, even if only by a small contingent of folks, when this isn’t the answer to all our soloing prayers. This is an Internet forum after all, where all opinions, fair or otherwise, get to be expressed.

Super smooth rope feed.  The rope pulls up against the spring in the pulley and then additionally against the second spring in the arm.  And there is also a positive internal stop on the pulley when pulled up. Feels like about 5 kg to pull against both springs.

I got mine yesterday, ordered Monday, so super fast! Granted it came from Petzl USA, in Salt Lake l, and I'm in Boise, but that still surprised me.

Pretty much as advertised. Feeds rope really easily, in both directions, feeding or pulling, tiny bits back and forth, or yarding it in/out.

I took it to my gym, to try, just going up through a draw, and me on the ground. Still, pulled it every which way, weighted and unweighted, braked and hands free, still about as I would expect.

My feeling is it will release easier than a grigri, so I'd want those backup knots close by, for hands free. I don't know, but it also feels "slipperier" to me, so I'd also be more cautious with the edge applications, personally. I'd test it out in the gym first, from the ground, if I knew it was going on a skinny, treated rope, for example.

I didn't have the rigging along to do any self belayed ascending, top rope soloing, anything like that, but, my feeling is it'd be okay for some of the off label shenanigans....but have your backup systems in place, and try it out someplace low risk first. See how it works....and how you can defeat it, with your particular setup. That's always a fun thing to do anyway, imo, see if you can fail the "foolproof" devices, lol!

But overall?

I think this is going to be a BIG hit for people like me, who just wanna painlessly get a rope gun up a single pitch route for some simple cragging, lol!

Off to City of Rocks again next week, so it'll be field tested soon!

Best, Helen

Looking forward to see how this works for lead belaying for folks. The folks who do that great testing of climbing gear (hownot2) have recieved theirs in and they're "packing them up".  That's from an email, site still shows it as a pre-order. 

https://hownot2.com/products/neox?syclid=cpi7jn4h33ns73bjiuc0&utm_campaign=emailmarketing_181111390523&utm_medium=email&utm_source=shopify_email&variant=48913110991163

I played with one at Rock and Resole yesterday. IMO, it is a huge improvement over the Gri Gri, BUT it is more reliant on the belayer's brake hand to initiate lock up. 

It's hard to justify this as a legitimate gripe because the brake hand has always been an important part of proper belaying. Unfortunately, I would expect more dropped leaders as these come into more inexperienced hands. 

Found this short video of how the Neox locks up hands free. Make of it what you will...

https://youtu.be/AkJ_5nbVPj8?si=io65Cze27GhKHOew

Victor Creazziwrote:

I played with one at Rock and Resole yesterday. IMO, it is a huge improvement over the Gri Gri, BUT it is more reliant on the belayer's brake hand to initiate lock up. 

It's hard to justify this as a legitimate gripe because the brake hand has always been an important part of proper belaying. Unfortunately, I would expect more dropped leaders as these come into more inexperienced hands.

I'm not sure about that. I think, noobs, or those people coming from an ATC, will do fine, because it is much more like an ATC belay. You actually need to be present and actively belaying, not just standing there feeding slack or taking it in now and then. Unfortunately, those coming from grigri use, and some of the grigri bad habits....may be in for some surprises.

But boy, if your hands are ATC trained?

This is gonna be a really nice device, I think!

H.

SICgripswrote:

Found this short video of how the Neox locks up hands free. Make of it what you will...

https://youtu.be/AkJ_5nbVPj8?si=io65Cze27GhKHOew

This vid, he is pulling from the climber side, and the rope is up and over something, already has the 180° bend in it. You won't get that hands free lock up if you just yank on the climber's side, straight out of the device, without a fairly stiff yank (2 handed, for me). But, it only needs the least bit of brake side brake to catch. So yeah, should catch hands free....but I'd still not expect that as the norm, just a last ditch hope.

EDIT to add, please also take note of the device unlocking again each time it is unweighted. That's one of the frustrations with grigris in short roping situations, getting it going again quickly. I haven't yet played with that aspect of this, not having a climber when I was dinking around yesterday. And, not wanting to be purposely dumping anyone, either, lol!

I used the Neox for a full day at the Petzl climbing festival in the Frankenjura last weekend. So my experience is limited. The device's intended use is for lead belaying using the ATC method. The foundation of that method is there should always be a hand on the brake strand and that hand should be below the device as much as possible. This absolutely needs to be a handled like an ATC. In feels like belaying with a Revo, in that it has braking assistance at the moment of the catch and paying out slack is uncomplicated. My first thoughts with the Neox were that this would be ideal for competition climbing. I'd expect some belayers to use it in the upcoming olympics. This is a better Revo for sure. That Petzel refinement is present for sure. When I returned the Neox to the Petzl stand at the festival I remarked that it's a bit spicey and needs attentive belaying. The Petzl rep. agreed. 

Forget the hands-free discussion for lead belaying. That is for fringe stuff like roped soloing. Anyone who rope solos will hopefully already know how to do their own testing and will already have have multi device experience as a baseline to measure the Neox against.  

  

Old lady Hwrote:

I think, noobs, or those people coming from an ATC, will do fine, 

H.

These are two groups that I would consider opposites of one another.  Though I agree that anyone used to a tuber will find the Neox a delight to use.

I will concede that the video posted by SIC Grips showed very surprising hands off behavior which I did not expect from my limited handling of the device.

This guy tries some belay from above and rappelling with the Neox. Less friction for both but manageable if you control the brake strand at all times, but it's not a handsfree device.

I would like to point out that the neox is now only 10g lighter than the wild country revo now, with the mod for faster locking up I don't see too much of a reason to pick the neox over the revo. 

that guy named sebwrote:

I would like to point out that the neox is now only 10g lighter than the wild country revo now, with the mod for faster locking up I don't see too much of a reason to pick the neox over the revo. 

I hate to be so blunt about this... But NOBODY WANTS A REVO! We're addicted to the gri gri, that's just how it is.

Thus ends the useful life of this thread. May the bickering commence

Old lady Hwrote:

This vid, he is pulling from the climber side, and the rope is up and over something, already has the 180° bend in it. You won't get that hands free lock up if you just yank on the climber's side, straight out of the device, without a fairly stiff yank (2 handed, for me). 

I did that 'cos that's what would happen direction wise in a fall. When I buddy check I yank the rope upwards like I would with a GriGri, needs a firmer yank than a GriGri but one handed for me.

that guy named sebwrote:

https://www.theuiaa.org/documents/safety-standards/129_BreakingDevice_UIAA_V9_2018.pdf

Thanks !  I didn't know this existed.

My first thought was that this test (fig. 7) is ridiculously easy for cammed devices because it uses a very high fall factor. We now know (from 2023 Hard Is Easy videos) that the situation these devices have the most trouble catching hands-free is actually a top-rope fall (e.g. just after clipping a draw) (especially if rope drag is involved).

Trying to reproduce this test at home (with a much smaller mass), I realized that the difficult part of this test is not catching the initial fall (which my Grigri1 can do just fine, even with a silly for it 8mm). The difficult part of this test is that when the load bounces back up, the cam tends to release and drop the load. Unfortunately, this last part may be impossible to test w/o a proper 80kg object - my attempts with 5kg fail even with a 10.2mm rope (well within Grigri1's spec). I'm guessing the strength of the cam spring relative to the weight used matters here. Also, it's possible that an 80kg FF2 cinches the cam better than an 5kg one. In any case, I admit this test is not as silly as I initially thought.

Still, the test is very different from the known real-world (top-rope) scenario described by Hard Is Easy in 2023. Not releasing after catching the initial fall strikes me as a very different problem from making sure the cam engages in the first place. A device could be easily engineered to solve the former problem, in a way that wouldn't necessarily help with the latter. I'm not saying anyone would do this intentionally, and the engineer in me hopes that the new wheel design is somehow helpful in "pushing the trade-off curve outward". But the fact that a device passes this high-factor test for a given diameter is hard to interpret in light of what we now know about when cammed devices actually fail to catch hands-free in real scenarios.

I have no idea what you're referring to or why you're talking about top rope belaying, the context is rope soloing, for lead and top rope belaying regular techniques should be used.

that guy named sebwrote:

I would like to point out that the neox is now only 10g lighter than the wild country revo now, with the mod for faster locking up I don't see too much of a reason to pick the neox over the revo. 

At about 11:15 the Revo is compared to the Neox

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETKWlKkzyHI&t=625s