KESSER Wall hose box, anthracite

The most completely equipped box on this shelf

Itemised in the listing: the reel, the garden hose, the connecting hose to the tap, a hand shower with a quick coupling, a hose nozzle, the wall bracket with mounting hardware, and instructions.

Two spray fittings rather than one, and the fixings in the box.

That is the difference between a product you mount on the Saturday it arrives and one that needs a trip for wall plugs.

The centrifugal brake

Named, and it is the component that matters most in this category.

Thirty metres of hose on a spring-loaded drum stores real energy. Released unbraked, the hose returns as fast as the spring can pull it — with a metal spray gun on the end, at whatever height it finds, across whatever is between it and the wall.

A centrifugal brake acts on the drum’s own rotation: the faster it spins, the harder it bites. The hose comes back at a walking pace whether one metre is out or thirty.

Two of the three wall boxes on this shelf name one. The third publishes a single feature line and does not mention it.

180 degrees, and folding flat

The bracket does two separate things and the listing names both.

Swivel: the box turns to face where you are working, so the hose leaves it in line with the pull rather than chafing over the edge of the mouth. That is where a fixed box wears its hose.

Fold flat: after use the box goes back against the wall. Taps are usually beside doors and along paths, and a box that stands proud is a box people walk into.

Removable, which is the winter requirement

A wall box is a plastic case, full of water, bolted to the outside of a house.

Water left in it through a hard frost expands and splits the hose from the inside, where it cannot be seen until spring. The retraction spring and the ratchet do not benefit from ice either.

The listing names a bracket the box lifts out of, specifically so it can be stored frost-free.

That is the whole maintenance regime for this category: drain in November, lift off, shed, rehang in March. A box mounted somewhere it cannot be reached and lifted is a box that will not survive many winters.

What goes unpublished

Anything about the hose.

No bore. No layer count. No burst pressure. No material.

That is the larger half of what is in the box, and one other wall box on this shelf does publish a figure for it — a 600 PSI burst, about 41 bar, on a three-layer PVC hose.

Here the hose is 30 metres long and otherwise undescribed.

And the thing to settle before drilling

A wall box’s reach is a radius from one point, and the point is chosen once.

Thirty metres in a straight line is a long way. Thirty metres round the corner of a house, past a shed and along a fence is considerably less, because every bend spends length on the obstacle rather than on the distance.

The carts on this shelf do not have this problem — you push them. The boxes never move, and the question to answer with a tape measure is how far the furthest thing in the garden is from that wall.

Availability

From 95 € to 103 €, that being the spread across the German, French, Italian and Spanish Amazon stores on the day of the survey.

Listed and unsold: the American and British Amazon catalogues hold the reference with nobody behind it.

Taken from Keepa on the day this page was last revised; stock and prices move without notice.