Is a Coil Garden Hose Right For Your Garden?

When choosing a new garden hose, it’s important to consider the way you’ll use it, as well as where you’ll store it. If you walk down the aisles of a hardware store or home improvement store, you’ll find dozens of different sizes, colors and types of garden hose, each of them seemingly perfectly suited for a particular purpose. Among them, you’ll see coil garden hoses, often in fashionable colors that will look great on your patio. Is a coil garden hose right for you? Here’s a quick rundown of the pros and cons of choosing a coil garden hose to help you decide whether it’s the right choice for you or whether you’d be better off with a more traditional ½ inch garden hose or 5/8 inch garden hose.

Easy to Use

Coil garden hoses, also called self-coiling garden hose, are essentially very easy to use. You connect it to the spigot, and move to where you want to go. The garden hose tends not to kink as long as you don’t pull it too hard or too far beyond its length.

Easy to Store

A coil garden hose essentially stores itself. You don’t have to coil it back up to put it away or wind it onto a garden hose reel. The flexible material is like a spring; you can pull it to reach other parts of the garden. When you release it or move back toward the spigot, the coils retract and coil back into shape.

Attractive

While most garden hose types come in just a few colors – most of them in the green range so they can blend in with your lawn – the coil garden hose tends to come in bright fashion colors, including turquoise, deep blue, gold, purple and, of course, green. Pick out the color that goes best with your patio furniture or accents your house.

Cons of Coil Garden Hose

There are down sides to a coil garden hose, of course. They’re designed for smaller spaces, and won’t stretch to their full length comfortably, so be sure to get a longer hose than you think you need. Once you start moving beyond its coiled range, the garden hose will tend to pull back. It’s not the hose you want to use if your intent is to fill a wading pool unless you’re filling it very close to the spigot.

If you intend to use the coil garden hose mostly on and around your patio and won’t be trying to pull it around corners, it might be the right choice for you. If you need more flexibility, you can choose from many other specialty garden hose products, including drinking safe garden hose, heated hose and 1-inch water hose for large volume water delivery.