HOZELOCK WONDERHOZE - THE GOOD AND THE BAD

About 16 years ago I bought a Hozelock Compact Hose Reel and hosepipe which was attached to my home's wall. It is still as in good condition as it was when I bought it but I started to find it problematic as time went by having to pull the hosepipe out of the reel and haul it through my small garden without knocking down plants with it in the process. As I have a balance disability it wasn't ideal for me struggling with the hosepipe which kept kinking as it came off the reel, or ideal to be lugging a watering-can around either.  Then I was mooching around a garden centre with a friend recently and spotted the Hozelock 'Wonderhoze'. 

Hozelock 'Wonderhoze'

It is simple to use. You attach the Wonderhoze to a tap (you will see I have white plumbing tape on my tap as that tap connection always manages to drip whatever I attach to it) and you turn on the water, The Wonderhoze worm suddenly fattens up, raring to go. NOTE: the Wonderhoze stretches in use by about three times its empty length and it is the expanded length which is advertised on the packaging.  I bought the shorter Wonderhoze and it hangs perfectly on the outside tap and didn't need a separate hanger. 

At both ends of the Wonderhoze there is a Hozelock Aquastop connector which means that if I disconnect my Hozelock 2669 Multi-Spray Gun from the end of it, for example, the water is trapped within the Wonderhoze and I don't get a shower in the process.  If I disconnect the Aquastop connector from the tap, then the water is also trapped in the hosepipe. NOTE: You will want to turn off the tap first if you don't want water still flowing from the tap, obviously.  

What I found a bit of getting used to was the pressure inside the Wonderhoze.  As long as there is water inside the hosepipe, under pressure, it is fat and similar to a normal plastic hosepipe but more flexible so, to get the Wonderhoze soft again for easy storage, you have to empty it and this is how: I turn off my outside water tap and then use the nozzle/gun to empty it. Believe me, it holds a lot of water (I empty mine into a watering can). While the water is being ejected, the worm starts to wither and shrink like the witch's legs under the house in The Wizard of Oz, and it becomes more flexible.  

A big problem I have finding though, and I am not absolutely sure why, is that the Hozelock Multi-Spray Gun 2669 (which I bought for it keeps, unfuriatingly, blowing off the end of the Wonderhoze.  Every time it does that, I have to empty the hose, and start again. I will write about my solution in another post about the gun, very soon to be published, when I know for sure it works.  

My garden is only about 30ft x 30ft and so I bought the 12.5 metre which can easily drape the hosepipe over my outside tap when empty, as seen in the above image. 

Hozelock Compact reel c.2010