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.

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.

I bought this kit as I was going on holiday and wanted my hanging baskets to survive while I was away. The value of the product seemed fantastic and you get a lot for your money. I installed the 13mm pipework around my house and tee'd off the 4mm pipes to the baskets quite easily. All went pretty well installation wise. The sensor unit was quite easy to set-up. Insert batteries and connect pipe. Sounds simple? It did state in the instructions that the sensor could take a day or so to sync. Until then I used the manual button to water. I was aprehensive it was going to work as it didn't come on once before I went away so I asked a friend to come round to check the baskets just in case. Good job I did! It didn't water automatically once! Boxed it up and returned it when I got home as it was no good if it didn';t water automatically. Few words of advice regarding the kit: the 13mm pipe expands a lot in direct sunlight, so if you attatch to a wall it sags between the brackets. I had to buy further brackets and space them 40cm apart to combat this. The reducers that you insert into the 13mm pipe to attach the 4mm pipe leak at the point of insertion. OK if you are on garden but these were leaking down my house wall. Had to buy 13mm to 4mm Tee pieces from an irrigation specialist.

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

Excellent buy. It kept all my greenhouse plants alive during the hottest week of the year when I was away, and it saves a lot of time watering. I have added another 25 drippers to the kit and some extra supply pipe and it is all working fine. I run the system for 5 minutes twice a day and that seems to do the trick. The only teething issue was some minor leakage between the tap and the unit and the unit and the pressure reducer which was solved with some Ptfe tape.

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.