VIDEO: How To Properly Don a Harness with Honeywell Miller® Fall Protection

Hi, my name is Bob Wengryn. I'm from Miller Fall Protection. Today I'm gonna show you the proper way to don a harness. So the first thing you wanna do is when you pick up a harness, find the back D ring, pick it up by the D ring. Make sure the buckles are unbuckled, shake it to make sure all the straps fall, fall down. Now, when you have it, when you're gonna put it on, you want to put it on like you're putting a jacket on. So you're gonna put it on over your shoulders and you know you put it on right because the D ring is not in front of you.

The first thing you wanna do is every harness has a chest strap. There's two reasons why you have a chest strap on a harness. One is for comfort, so these shoulders aren't falling off like suspenders. But the other reason is that if you took a head first fall, it keeps us from opening up and you're falling out of the harness. So you want to, this can be as loose or as tight as you want, somewhere in the mid-chest range, but you need to buckle this. Now, as far as your legs go, you're gonna buckle your legs and after you buckle them, you're gonna check. Now, the proper place for the legs to be is up in this area. So if you put your leg straps on and they're hanging by your knees, the initial reaction is you wanna tighten your leg straps. What you probably need to adjust is your shoulder straps, because your shoulder straps adjust how long the harness is. So when you tighten your shoulder straps, it pulls the leg straps up to where they're supposed to be.

In this particular style harness, the way you tighten the shoulder straps is you literally pull it up with the friction buckles and it'll snug it up to where it's supposed to be. Every harness has a D ring in the back. This is the only place you would attach your 6 ft. shock-absorbing lanyard or retractable lifeline to. As far as the legs go, once you have them in the right position, how tight should they be? Well, again, you don't want them so loose that they're flapping in the wind. But on the other hand, you don't want them so tight that you're all hunched over because they're too tight to move in. So the rule of thumb is the finger test. If I can take my fingers and comfortably pass it through here, that's tight enough. If I can put my fist through it, that's too loose. Fingers.

Also, every harness has this strap right here. The strap is called a sub-pelvic strap. The purpose of that strap is that if you fell and you were suspended in the air, it acts like a seat. If you didn't have that strap in the harness and you were suspended in the air, the leg straps would literally choke your legs, making it extremely uncomfortable and potentially dangerous to hang there for any period of time. The reason I'm showing you this is when you put your harness on and you do all the adjustments, you need to make sure you reach back here and make sure this strap is, in fact, below your butt. I've seen people cinch them up so tight the strap's in the small of your back, that's not going to do you any good. Make sure it's in the proper position. That's the proper way to adjust the harness. Thank you very much.