Tripping was a way of life for our family.

Every time we had a bad trip, though, we’d always blame each other for bringing each other down, rather than doing anything constructive about it, until this spring when I used my birthday gardening vouchers and bought-

A Wall Mounted Through Flow Hose Reel !

Now we can easily roll the hose away after use, and avoid all those trips, frayed tempers and wrecked hose [at least, that is the theory]

The Hozelock 60m thru flow reel comes packed in pieces in a big cardboard box. DO NOT THROW THE BOX AWAY until you have got it all up and running, because the assembly instructions are all in pictorial form on the flaps under the lid.
It’s reasonably easy to put together- it doesn’t fit properly if you get it wrong, so one cup of coffee should be enough to see you through to getting ready to mount it on the wall. Hozelock also supply a hose guide to attach to the corner or side of your property so that the hose doesn’t scrape when you pull it out.

Once you have fitted the supplied bracket [with four screws] to the wall, the hosereel just slips into place, and you can attach your dedicated piece of feed hose from the reel to your tap. This is how the ‘thru flow’ works- your dedicated short length supplies water through the centre of the reel to the end of your main hose. [You could always fit a two or four way adaptor to your tap, so’s you can leave the reel permanently attached.]

The reel has a side handle to wind the hose back up with- I’d recommend not putting more than 50m of half inch hose on, even though it is rated for 60m by the manufacturer, otherwise you have to be obsessively neat about how it is arranged to get it all on.

So far, the kids still think that it is a good game to wind the hose back up, and they find it quite easy, but I have had to upgrade the screws holding the mounting bracket to the wall,
as 50m of hose weighs a lot when full of water, and exerts plenty of leverage.

It’s really good to be able to unroll just as much as needed, and have the water already plumbed in: the tidying away is immeasurably easier than coiling by hand, and like most hozelock stuff, appears to be pretty well made and designed apart from the fixing screws not being meaty enough..

There are also two ‘clikfix’ mountings on the edge of the reel for you to store any spare nozzles etc that you may have, rather than leaving them sculling around on the floor- not much help for the big spray lance, but still useful.

All in all, I can only say
“Water good idea”.