HOZELOCK - Drip Irrigation Kit 25 Pots : Ideal for Pots, Window Boxes and Vegetable Gardens, Easy to Use, Supplied with 25m of Hose and a Timer for Precise, Independent Watering [2804 1240]

Fidderly but worth it

There are many good reasons for considering a drip irrigation system at the current time, especially as they provide a loophole to watering the garden during a hosepipe ban. This Hozelock system is the most readily available and generally works well. However the claim that it can be installed in minutes is massively wide of the mark. It will take you several hours to get one of these working properly and you'll need to work around some design flaws. The main problem is the 13mm delivery pipe which is flimsy and kinks easily and the T and right angle unions which fit poorly in the tube. This is exacerbated by a flow relief valve at the tap end which barely has any effect on inhibiting the flow rate. With any vaguely workable water pressure, the joints just blow apart. This can be solved by adding a pack of ratchet clamps into the mix but that's an additional expense. Once you've got it all plumbed in, the timer is rather an arcane thing to operate and is not very intuitive. The manual isn't much help and all the videos I found online are for older models. A little sticker contained within the packaging offers the best advice. Once you've have it operating, the system works well as our lush green vegetables testify. Recommended, but allow a day in your schedule to get your head round it.

Being able to set it to water at sunrise and/or sunset is very useful. Setting it up could be a bit fiddly for some, but I had no problem. Take your time and be patient. There are plenty of additional accessories available for this system and they all work very well. One issue was a horrible loud noise that resonated throughout the house. Initially I thought that is was the timer, but it wasn't. It was the pressure regulator. This is a very simple design and the valve inside it charters. Maybe it might be worth Hozelock redesigning it to eliminate the noise? Anyway, the fix is to remove it entirely, remove the rubber seal from the irrigation hose connector and replace it with the filter from the regulator, making sure that the dome on the filter points towards the control valve. Its then possible to regulate the water flow by means of the supply tap. The operation is then silent.

The senor I purchased in 2019 seemed to work well for the first summer, I then uncoupled and put in my large dry shed at the end of the summer. In 2020 then sensor failed to work I called hozelock who replaced immediately. At this stage I purchased a second to add to my irrigation system and again put in a nice large dry shed until summer this year 2021. In 2021 both the replacement and the second one I purchased sensors failed. I looked back at my orders from Amazon and noticed in 2019 when I purchased my first sensor timer there were 2 other reviews about the sensors failing. Clearly i didn’t see that. When I queried this with hozelock he replaced the last purchase only which was received in3-4days. The irrigation pipe work has expanded and contacted until I now have most of the spurs leaking quite a lot and for the last week had to be switched, off several times due to complete failure and loss of water. Clearly these hozelock sensors have a problem lasting only 1 summer. My timers were attached to an out door tap west facing, the irrigation pipe work does go round the south facing house but covered by climbing plants. I clearly can not rely on the hozelock sensor timers or the hozelock irrigation system while I’m away apart from plants dying the cost of water loss could be significant. Hozelock said they would pass all this information on to marketing. I have now purchased another 2 sensor timers from another famous company, just got to renew the hozelock irrigation system now. A very expensive experience and one I will not repeat.

It works. But the drippers are too fast - 4L/h which means 1.5 cups of water get dumped into each flower-pot in a 5 minute watering, which is more than can be absorbed by all but the biggest pots, so you end up with most of the water leaking out of the bottom of the pots. The spike drippers also do seem to vary a lot in the rate the drip water. The kit is ok to get you started. But you will soon be spending money on extra parts. The good news is that the 4mm and 13mm pipes are quite standard, so you can buy cheaper generic and 3rd party add ons. I ended up replacing the timer (with a cheap two zone timer) and getting some Gardena 2L/h drippers. So I have a good working system, but with very little of it is actually part of the original hoselock kit.

Was dubious as you can only have the water dripping for an hour at a time (there is a manual override button for extra watering) twice a day. However we were away for a week during the latest heatwave of 30oC + for 5 days and when I came home everything in pots was alive and flourishing. The sensor to switch the water on at dusk and dawn for an hour is perfect. I put more outlets on the bigger pots and even though the water dribbles out enough is delivered in an hour. Only thing I found, and it’s my fault, is if the supply to the box is too high it makes a pulsing sound. So I tuned the tap down the pressure regulator in the kit balances everything out again. Simples, get one, ditch the watering can.

The Hozelock kit proved a very welcome birthday gift. My son had considered buying it for himself.

The way this irrigation system is designed it's almost guaranteed to leak. It's also poor value for money as most people will need to buy additional accessories to get it to water 25 pots satisfactorily. Characteristically, Hozelock also haven't bothered to produce an instruction booklet with legible diagrams, which the whole experience of setting up the system even more frustrating. Once the instructions have been decoded I found that the straight- and right-angled connectors for the 13mm supply tube leaked slightly even when secured with ratchet clamps (I used: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B071W8NG2K?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title ). Similarly, piercing the 13mm tube with the hole punch provided and inserting the 4mm straight connector frequently resulted in leaks. The drippers that Hozelock supply aren't adjustable so the amount of water delivered to a pot is pretty similar regardless of the latter's capacity. I may well replace them with non-Hozelock adjustable micro-sprinklers (e.g. https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B075M65J74/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 ) at some point. Finally, the Select Timer isn't reliable and programming it isn't well-thought out. As others have pointed out if you want it to water in the middle of the night you initially need to get up in the middle of the night to set it up. I ended up replacing it with a water timer from Diivoo (https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0C3VS24BW?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title&th=1 ), which is far better quality, very easy to set up and - equally importantly - doesn't leak. Plants are now quite expensive, as indeed is water these days. Therefore, getting an irrigation system that is reliable and watertight is worth the effort. Unfortunately, the Hozelock system needed significant modification to achieve these goals.

Irrigation de plantes et de légumes.

Après 6 mois d'utilisation, je peux vous confirmer que le produit est cher pour ce que c'est. Les piles se vident rapidement mais SURTOUT la programmation est extrêmement compliquée et le programmateur ne se met souvent pas en route donc plusieurs jours sans eau pour les plantes !

Il me manque les articles suivants qui n'étaient pas dans la boîte : - Dripper with Stake (x15) - Stake (x10)

Le descriptif n'est pas bon. Sur la fiche je devais avoir un programmateur avec fonction crépusculaire et aube, et je n'ai qu'un programmateur 24h. Je vais m'en contenter mais c'est limite.