Save water and time with this easy garden hose repair. Patch pinholes and small hose leaks using parts and tools you probably have at home.
Sometimes, a garden hose will spring a pinhole. Every leak reduces the amount of water reaching our plants, or increases the time we have to spend watering to give the plants enough. In hot, dry weather, time spent watering is at a premium! Leaky hoses can waste a lot of water in one growing season! We need ways to get leaky hoses back in action quickly. Here’s a way to quickly repair hose pinholes, using parts you likely already have in your shed.
If you’re dealing with larger holes, or lengthwise cracks, cut out the damaged portion and see my August 2017 post Step-by-Step Garden Hose Repairs. If it’s a very small hole, you likely have been questioning whether it’s worth the time to cut the hose and fit a repair coupling. Here’s an alternative (with no cutting) that’s very quick to do.

Plastic hose repair clamps often last longer than the inserts. I hope you kept some clamps. Maybe you don’t have as impressive a collection as I do, but you only need one for each repair. The other item you need is a piece of inner tube. Tools needed are a permanent marker to circle the pinhole before you lose sight of it, scissors to cut the inner tube, and a Phillips screwdriver for the clamp.
Cut a piece of inner tube a bit longer than the clamp, and wrap it around the hose over your circled pinhole. Fit the halves of the clamp around the inner tube, being careful to keep it smooth rather than bunched up. Have the clamps directly over the hole. Fit the screws and tighten the clamp. Test the hose. You’re done.

Buy Good-Quality Watering Tools
I’ve noticed that cheap hoses usually crack up, and that it’s the better-quality ones that eventually spring pinholes. Those good hoses are really worth repairing! Without being paid to say so, I like the Gilmour Flexogen hoses. Their heavy-duty hoses have a lifetime warranty, and even their medium-duty ones have a 10 year warranty. That’s for home use. They also sell professional hoses, as well as the heavy-duty all-metal hose repair ends I advocate in Step-by-Step Garden Hose Repairs.
Pam Dawling has worked at Twin Oaks Community in central Virginia for more than 27 years, growing vegetables for 100 people on 3.5 acres and training many members in sustainable vegetable production. She is the author of Sustainable Market Farming and The Year-Round Hoophouse. Pam often presents workshops at MOTHER EARTH NEWS FAIRs and at sustainable agriculture conferences. She is a contributing editor with Growing for Market magazine, and a weekly blogger onSustainableMarketFarming.com. Read all of Pam’s MOTHER EARTH NEWS posts here.
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