Can You Use a Garden Hose Indoors?

Your garden hose is a trusted companion, helping you with your gardening and outdoor work around the house. You can hook up your garden hose to your outdoor faucet and cart it around to anywhere you need it using wheeled garden reels. Your hose can help you get water to the furthest reaches of your yard and driveway without having to haul it around in a bucket – why can’t you have the same convenience indoors? With a few accessories and some forethought, you can have the same convenience your garden hose offers you outdoors for your indoor gardening adventures.
Coil Garden Hose
The coil garden hose was created specifically to help with watering needs in tight spaces like patio gardens, but in most cases, manufacturers assume that you’ll be hooking up your coil garden hose to an outdoor water spigot and bringing it around to the patio. Apartment dwellers may not have that luxury. Even those that have patios large enough for a container garden may not have easy access to an outdoor water hookup. The coil garden hose may be easy to store, but in most cases, it needs a little help to be an efficient indoor garden hose. Exactly what other accessories you need will depend on a few important factors.
Water Source
You’ll have either two or three sources of water for your watering needs: your kitchen faucet, your bathroom faucet and your washing machine hookup. The easiest choice for connecting a garden hose indoors is your washer hookup because chances are that it’s already threaded to accept a garden hose. If you don’t have a washer hookup in your apartment, you’ll probably need a faucet hose adapter. They’re easily available at most hardware stores or online.
Distance
The distance you need to travel will determine the length of garden hose you need. In most cases, a 25 foot garden hose will suffice, but in larger apartments – or if you have to bring the hose from the back of the house to the front – you may need a 50-foot garden hose. In either case, a 1/2 inch garden hose is likely to be your best choice. It will deliver enough water pressure to get the job done and offers less risk of flooding your kitchen and living room.
If you’re going to be connecting a garden hose to an indoor faucet and carrying the hose through the house, you’ll want to be sure you’re using a high quality, drinking safe garden hose with solid brass garden hose fittings. A sturdy brass fitting is far less likely to warp out of shape, and will make a secure, water-tight connection to your faucet so it doesn’t leak all over your floor.
Likewise, if you’re going to use a kitchen or bathroom faucet, be sure to choose a high-quality, well-made hose-to-faucet adapter that won’t leak and spray water all over your kitchen.
There’s no reason to haul buckets of water through your house to water a patio garden just because you don’t have an outdoor faucet. With proper attention to details, you can easily adapt an indoor faucet for use with a good quality garden hose.