After six weeks and more than 30 hours of testing, we determined that the Craftsman Premium Rubber Garden Hose is the best garden hose currently available on the market. Not only is this hose sturdy and manageable, but it’s also durable and comes with a lifetime manufacturer’s warranty. For people who need a garden hose for extremely cold weather, the Clear Flow garden hose is a viable alternative.
Why trust us?
We read through gardening forums, garden hose reviews, and the r/gardening subreddit to determine what consumers care about most when choosing a garden hose. We then spent 30 hours over the course of six weeks testing each of our garden hose finalists. Since we also reviewed the best garden hose nozzles at the same time, we were able to test the compatibility of each garden hose with a wide range of popular garden hose nozzles.
How we selected finalists to test
In order to determine which of our garden hose finalists was best overall, we ran each of them through a series of tests designed to analyze how each garden hose would perform in real-life situations. This was aided by actual watering and gardening of our front and backyard over the course of a month and a half. A lot of what we measured had to do with the overall ergonomics of each garden hose. We made note of which garden hoses would tend to get stuck while being pulled around the yard, as well as how easy — or unwieldy — they were while being dragged around. We also looked at how easy it was to attach and detach each hose to the spigot, as well as to each of the garden hose nozzles we were testing. We recorded how often each hose kinked, which we also tested by measuring how tightly we could squeeze each hose before the water flow would stop. We measured the water flow from each garden hose as well. We tested this by measuring how long it took each garden hose to fill a five-gallon bucket of water, and the distance each garden hose could spray when held horizontally at a height of five feet.Finally, we considered the overall build quality, including the materials used, and the durability of each hose — particularly in very hot and very cold conditions.
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