Compared to our picks, there was nothing remarkable about the Gorilla Extremelite 5/8 in. x 50 ft. Heavy Duty Garden Hose and ToughLite 5/8 in. x 50 ft. Heavy Duty Garden Hose. We were especially curious about the Extremlite, but the tool-free couplings are small and difficult to manage with wet hands.
The Dramm ColorStorm Premium Rubber Hose (50 feet) was a previous pick but a combination of long-term kinking issues and the newly elevated price tag have put it out of contention. We think it’s barely worth $50 and certainly not worth over $100.
The Giraffe Lightweight Lay Flat Water Hose seems great on paper as a nice, thin hose, but once we filled it, it lost its shape and turned into a regular hose. It feels a lot flimsier than our picks.
Even though we’ve formed a generally negative opinion of expandable hoses, we tested HydroTech Standard Expandable Hose thinking it might change our minds. It didn’t. It feels inadequate, it’s difficult to manage, and even at its most stretched out, we couldn’t get it to 50 feet.
The Goodland Everlasting Garden Hose is light and floppy compared with the Continental hose, but it’s heavier and stiffer than the Eley pick. It comes in a number of designer colors, which is nice, but based on performance alone, it’s tough to justify the nearly $200 price tag, especially since we already consider the $120 Eley hose to be on the pricey side.
We once recommended the Flexzilla Garden Hose, but it did not hold up well over long-term use. This hose is still lightweight and flexible, and its coupling hardware is still solid, but its stiff sidewalls have degraded and it kinks.
Although the Gilmour Flexogen Super Duty Hose handled well enough, the steel spring coils on the end — intended to prevent kinking on and near the fittings — made us bleed when we tried to unscrew the hose from the spigot. No thanks.
The Teknor Apex NeverKink Heavy Duty felt great to handle, and the sleek yellow racing stripe down the middle made us feel like gardening champions. But it was almost too firm — knocking over patio furniture and stubbornly catching on branches and thorns. And on the occasion that it did kink (despite its name), we found undoing those knots and tangles to be difficult.
The Teknor Apex Zero-G looks like it should be an expandable hose, even though it isn’t one. It’s a good, flexible hose overall, and some hardware-store employees we spoke with even recommended it as a better alternative to an expandable hose. Although it’s lightweight and generally reliable, nothing about it stood out enough for us to make it a pick.
The Water Right 600 Series Polyurethane Garden Hose seemed almost too good to be true — in our tests, it was durable, sturdy, and remarkably easy to maneuver. But once this hose finally kinked, it was difficult to straighten out — a problem we’ve seen repeated in negative owner reviews.
We’ve tested and dismissed the Gilmour Flexogen Super Duty Garden Hoser, and we briefly recommended the Tuff-Guard Perfect Garden Hose, but it ended up leaking during long-term testing.
We also dismissed a number of hoses without testing them, as we determined (during our research or our in-person assessments at various hardware stores) that they did not meet our criteria. This group included the Apex Medium Duty, the Flexon Medium Duty Garden Hose, the Goodyear Maxlite Premium Rubber+, the Plastair Springhose PUWE650B94H-AMZ,, and the terrible yet terribly ubiquitous Pocket Hose Silver Bullet Lightweight Kink-Free Expandable Garden Hose.
The Suncast Hosemobile Hose Reel Cart represents everything meh about inexpensive hose reels. It’s unstable, takes too much effort, and feels kinda flimsy. If you’re truly after a low-budget hose reel, get this one, but keep in mind that it causes a lot of frustrations.
Gorilla sells a number of other reel configurations, both larger and smaller than the 175-foot model we recommend. The smaller models lack the top handle, making them more difficult to move around, while the larger ones can get quite bulky. But if you need 200 feet of hose reeled up, the GRM-200G 200 ft. Mobile Hose Reel looks nice, as does the 250 ft. Heavy Duty Hose Reel Cart.
As for other hose reels, we also looked at models made by Liberty, including the 302 2-Wheel Garden Hose Reel Cart and the decorative Bronze Steel Rotating Wall-Mounted Garden Reel. Overall, buyer reviews of the Liberty reels aren’t anywhere near as stellar as those of the Eley cart, with mentions of rusting over time and leaking. Even though the Eley reel costs more, its quality (backed by Eley’s 10-year warranty) makes it the better purchase.
We have not yet tested the Giraffe Tools Retractable Hose Reel. It looks similar to the Hoselink model but has a larger-diameter hose, measuring 0.625 inch as opposed to 0.5 inch. Although it lacks a quick-connect system, it otherwise looks like a decent option. Typically it sells for about $40 less than the Hoselink offering.
This article was edited by Harry Sawyers.
