A quick, personal review of ultralight carabiners

I’ve been using the Cypher Ceres II biners for the past year and like them a lot.  I’ll have to give the Mydas a look.

I like the Ceres II carabiners for alpine draws as well. It's worth noting that the size/shape, gate and nose are exactly identical to Trango Phase carabiners if you like the design but prefer a matte finish. The only difference is that the Trangos have 3 ridges on the top of the spine that wrap around the side, while the Cypher has 8 bumps all the way down (as did the Phase before 2010ish).

I have started replacing my all my racking biners with Cyper Mydas carabiners. I bought a bunch at 15% off from Gear.com as they offer a discount for first time customers, and then my shipment got delayed and they sent me a 20% off coupon... so I'll be getting some more next month, too! My shipment only got delayed by one day, too-- talk about great customer service. Anyway, here are the updates from my swapping out the biners. 

My alpine draws were a mixture of modern cheapo biners and ancient, super heavy biners from the 80s. This was the obvious first place to start.

I zeroed the scale with a box to hold the draws and got 1151 grams.

After replacing biners with Cyper Mydas (except for two rope side biners which I kept with DMM Revolvers on them, I love having a couple Revolver draws on me for rope drag mitigation without extension necessary) it weighed an astonishing amount less:

If I'm doing my math right that.s .67 pounds that I have saved on my harness. Holy weight savings, Batman.

Next I did my rack of Totems which have modern semi-lightweight cheapo racking biners. I included the sling I rack them on and also note that I keep a #3 BD C4 on my rack of Totems, as for me at least a rack that doesn't go to 3 is no single rack at all. It came in at 1195 grams:

This weight savings wasn't nearly as significant due to being much less biners and not featuring any 50 gram biners from the 80s, but it still wasn't nothing:

That is a tenth of a pound just going from modern cheapo biners to modern ultra light weight biners! Other racks will feature more carabiners (especially my rack of Metolius cams which feature two additional cams to comprise an entire rack) so I estimate that when I get these all switched out to Mydas then when climbing trad between the draws and a double rack (and let's be real, I normally take some micros and maybe a couple triples, I love my gear) I'll be saving almost exactly one pound off my harness. When doing big walls where I have at least a triple rack I'll be saving probably on the order of 1.2 pounds, and once I go to Mydas quickdraws it will be even more.

Thanks for the recommendation, Nick! These biners rock! They're definitely on the smaller side but they're not so small that they're annoying to use and honestly the gate opening isn't any smaller than many of my ancient D carabiners from the 80s. 

This place really is pretty freakin rad sometimes; again, can't thank you enough for the recommendation-- I thought going lightweight was going to be years away because lightweight carabiners are either super annoying to use if affordable or really expensive if they're actually usable, but with these bad boys I can afford to upgrade right now. Me and all my climbing partners thank you! 

Glad it was helpful!  Thats a ton of weight lol.

I recently picked up a rack pack of the new Petzl Spirit carabiners to clean up a mixed assortment of gray carabiners on my extra rack that I let friends borrow.  After climbing on them for a few weekends of single pitch trad I have to say that I really like them.  I haven't checked the weights but Petzl claims 37gm each.  The gate action is really nice, they rack nicely on gear loops, they are very clean to pull from gear loops and also to pull the rope out when cleaning the pitch.  Overall I didn't expect to be such a snob about the gate feel of the carabiner but I really do like these a lot more than the BD carabiners that most of my alpine draws and racking carabiners are (mix of Ozs and Hoodwires).  I really like clean noses for everything but racking my nuts, I was very fond of wire gates but don't care as much anymore.  I also have a handful of Anges, both large and small.  I like handling the Spirits much more than the Anges but I wouldn't avoid them either.

Can confirm that the BD OZ anti-snag nose hoods are wide enough that clipping pitons or homemade bolt hangers is sometimes impossible. I'll only take them on single pitch sport days now.

I'm still salty at having to run out every pitch of a sport multi because half of my draws were OZs that didn't fit in the homemade hangers' drilled holes.

Nobody's mentioned my favorite lightweight carabiner, the CAMP Photon. Not quite as light as the nano but much nicer to use. I found their gates sometimes got sticky after a few years, but a drop of bicycle chain lube cleared that right up and I've had no issues since.

Edelrid 19G's - 19 grams or so. A bit small but usable. Lighter than anything mentioned yet. 

Grivel lockers - 35 grams. 

Love my helium IIs

Nice having higher open gate and cross loading ratings too. Gives a warm fuzzy feeling when biners/gear don't sit right.

Billcoe wrote:

Edelrid 19G's - 19 grams or so. A bit small but usable. Lighter than anything mentioned yet. 

Grivel lockers - 35 grams. 

20g and verging on unusable. 

Grivel twin gates are really nice though, they have a mini hms twingate at 39g making it the lightest autolocker out there.