Ever since we built our massive flower bed in the front garden, it’s been a massive hassle to have to keep watering it every few days in the summer. Also, I don’t have a water tap in the garden, so I have to drag a giant hose from the back garden to do this. It’s a right hassle!
This weekend I decided to give it a go making a DIY soaker hose so that I could just plug my usual hose into this soaker one and leave it running to do all the watering itself. In this blog post, I’ll cover how I did it and why it unfortunately wasn’t suitable for my particular needs. It did turn out to be a great system though so I’ve also got some tips for when you can use something like this.
MATERIALS & TOOLS REQUIRED
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Materials
Keep in mind that this system is designed to be used with an existing hose that connects to a tap on one end and has a Hozelock aqua stop connector on the other end. If you don’t have one, you will require extra materials to make that as well.
Tools
- Drill with 3mm drill bit
TIPS FOR WHEN THIS SET UP WORKS BEST
- Your soaker hose is not located too far from the tap which will be pumping the water into it
- The area to cover with your soaker hose is not too big
- The area you want to water is either flat or is sloping down – do not try to water uphill
STEP 1: ATTACH THE AQUA STOP CONNECTORS
Get a plain garden hose. You can buy a new hose for this if you don’t have an old one lying around. This is what I did. I got one with a diameter of 12.5mm.
Grab both ends of the hose and attach the Aqua Stop connectors. To do this, unscrew the grey cap from a connector and put the hose through there. Then, wriggle the hose over the white sticky-out thing inside the connector. This will take a bit of wriggling as it is designed to be tight. Once the hose is on, screw the grey cap back on.
STEP 2: DRILL HOLES IN YOUR HOSE
Drill small holes all the way down the hose. Try to space them fairly evenly and not too far apart. Depending on how long your hose is, this bit may take a bit of time.
STEP 3: PLACE THE HOSE IN POSITION
When the hose is drilled all the way down, it’s time to place it. Run it weaving in between your plants, where required. I stretched mine all down the flower bed, snaking it in between all the plants. I read that you can cover it with mulch if you like but I left mine exposed as I feel like mulch may block the small holes after a while.
STEP 4: TEST THE SET UP
With this particular set up, the idea is to leave the soaker hose in place permanently and to switch it on by connecting another hose to it, one which is connected to a tap. I already have such a hose and it does have another Hozelock connector on the end of it. I used the double ended male connector to join this hose to the soaker hose and switched my normal hose on at the tap.
As I said above, this didn’t work as well as I needed it to. The water sprinkled out for a few metres but then it didn’t reach any further. This is because of x3 reasons:
- My connector hose connects to the house far away – about 15 meters away so by the time the water gets to the soaker hose, the pressure isn’t great
- My flower bed slopes up – the connector hose isn’t long enough to reach the other end of the flower bed to make the water run slope down
- My flower bed is massive – the hose I used in there is 30 metres long which is a huge distance to cover even without the 2 above issues
This means that unfortunately I’m stuck manually watering my flower bed for now. Don’t let that stop this from being a great set up for you though – if your space meets the criteria to make this work, go for it!
