The one casualty of the power wall project was the post that held the reel for a water hose we use a lot–sadly, the post was in the way and had to go. Not so sadly, it was a wood post, so the bottom was pretty much rotted out. You can see the post on the right side of the second image below–lots of rot, and it was only a matter of time before it would have fallen over.
Annoyingly, the hose just sat in a jumble on the ground for the next couple months. Then, after some prodding on my part (mainly kvetching about the tangled mess I had to deal with when using the hose), Agent Smith had a brainwave which solved not one but two hose problems.
In late 2016 I picked up a very swanky hose reel, thinking we’d use it by the pool. The poor thing then sat on a shelf in the garage for three years as we went with a simpler option. Then a few months after the power wall was installed, Agent Smith installed the reel in basically the same spot, using fencepost cement and a piece of metal pipe instead of a 4×4 section of wood to avoid future rot issues.
In the spirit of ‘waste not want not,’ the old hose holder was repurposed by the main water line stand valves, finally getting the hose there up off the ground.
Hoses on the ground were very much the POs’ standard modus operandi. When we moved here, there were hoses all over the place–on the ground, under bushes, hanging on fence posts and, most famously, strung across various areas to serve as impromptu fencing. Slowly but surely they have all been tossed out. We get by with just a few hoses close to the house, and should we need one further afield, we have a very long hose on a cart. And since we recently replaced the sprayer the POs had abandoned in the stables–later modified to sit in the back of the mini truck or attached to Dino’s forks–said tank can now be used for water delivery should we need it.
All told, we’ve probably removed close to a mile of rubber hoses and metal water pipes that were no longer of use. The hoses usually disintegrated upon contact, and the pipes were broken and/or rusted out. Most of the pipes dated back to when this was a horse property, but the two dozen or so hoses were all the doing of the POs.