Heightec: Integrity – Excellence – Innovation
Heightec is a leading authority within the professional height safety and rescue industry, designing and manufacturing innovative equipment and delivering specialist training.
These are the three core values of Heightec’s mission statement - to be the most sophisticated supplier for specialist work at height, by joining these values of elegant, innovative products and expertise in methods of use. Heightec was founded in 1997 by people with extensive practical experience of rope access, caving and mountain rescue. Their sole purpose to design and manufacture technical safety equipment. It was clear that existing equipment for work at height was not sufficiently adapted for more technical or industrial applications.
The first significant innovation was the Phoenix harness, an advanced rescue product for the UK Fire & Rescue Services and industrial rescue teams. The Phoenix earned a UK Design Council Millennium Award for innovation and remains the most widely used harness in the UK fire service.
Heightec now offers a comprehensive range of height safety products including rope devices, harnesses, lanyards, rope, ready-to-use work kits and rescue systems, serving all industries who work at height, UK and worldwide.
The company now benefits from an extensive technical design, development and production team, complete with computer aided design and material simulation and test facilities complying with requirements of international standards. Keith Jones, Managing Director stated “our approach is to work very closely with customers to ensure designs achieve exactly what they need in terms of functional performance. For heightec innovation is not merely a route to new products but as a core competence at the heart of everything we do. This is a continuous challenge for our design team”.
A key product that had been missing from the range was a technical safety helmet. The market was clearly indicating demand for a helmet that could confirm to two different standards (EN397 Industrial and EN12492 Climbing). Users were indicating that they needed a helmet that could completely satisfy the needs of two different product standards. Technical work at height requires a helmet addressing risks of falling (EN 12492), whereas typical industrial situations contain hazards relating to entrapment and dropped objects (EN397). Each product requires a chinstrap with quite different release strengths.
The solution required a completely new, patented design chinstrap buckle which has variable release force. The resulting DUON helmet was launched and is the most versatile and advanced technical safety helmet on the market.
