Do screamers really work?
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The climbing gear with the coolest name is a screamer.
It's a specialty sling that’s sewed together to be sort of shock absorber, intended to minimize the fall force that gets applied to sketchy trad or aid climbing gear.
Many aid climbers (me included) have wondered if they actually work, and are worth the cost.
HowNOT2 tested different screamer flavors, made by Yates, Edelrid and Petzl.
On a standard anchor with no screamer they found that dropping a 205 pound / 93 kg rock generated about 8 kN on the anchor.
When a screamer was added, that force on the anchor was reduced to between 3.8 kN and 6-ish kN, depending on manufacturer. (The Edelrid G screamer tested the best, with Yates not far behind.)
So yeah, up to about a 50% reduction in peak load, that’s a significant improvement! That’s still enough force to pull out a tiny piece of aid gear, but it's enough force reduction so it could definitely help with a piece that's slightly stronger.
Do you need to run out and buy a bunch of them? Probably not. But, if you’re doing more advanced trad or aid climbing on small gear, having a couple of these might be a good idea.
If you want to really nerd out on screamers and see all the break test results, here's the video from HowNOT2.