The Best Hose Nozzles, Lab-Tested and Reviewed
Our top-rated nozzles will make quick work of lawn and garden tasks
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You can use a hose without a nozzle, but it’s not going to be a very productive experience. Most of our recommended hoses don’t come with their own nozzles, so you’ll need to purchase one separately unless you want the water from your hose dribbling out at a lethargic rate. We tested 18 nozzles, including standard multipattern nozzles, wand nozzles, and high-pressure nozzles, to find those with the best flow rate (or, roughly, water volume) so you can water your plants and wash your car as efficiently as possible.
Multipattern Hose Nozzles
Multipattern hose nozzles have easy-to-rotate front faces that change the spray pattern and the amount of water that passes through. The names and symbols of the patterns may differ, but it’s easy to visually identify the pattern based on the resulting water flow.
Watering Wand Hose Nozzles
High-Pressure Hose Nozzles
We also tested high-pressure hose nozzles, which are marketed as delivering pressure-washer-level strength without the necessity of buying a separate pressure washer. After concluding his tests, Bernie Deitrick, who led the testing for hose nozzles, called the category—judging, at least, from the models we tested—disappointing. In our tests, these models didn’t (and can’t) increase water pressure beyond that of a standard hose nozzle, yet they’re often more expensive. You are probably better off sticking with one of our recommended nozzles or purchasing a separate pressure washer for more intense cleaning tasks. You can see our recommended pressure washer nozzles here. Check out our high-pressure hose nozzle ratings here.
Our hose nozzle test was simple but fun to do.
How We Tested
For this product category, we focused our tests on the most important metric for any hose nozzle: its flow rate. Flow rate can be roughly described as the volume (in gallons) of water each nozzle delivers per minute. We tested this at our Yonkers headquarters by hooking each nozzle to a hose and spraying water into a bucket for 30 seconds, then weighing the bucket. We did this for each water pattern (or setting) offered by the nozzle.
Higher flow rates equate to a higher score because a higher flow rate decreases the amount of time you have to spend on your watering task, whatever that may be. We found, for example, that the highest maximum flow rate (based on our specific setup) our models offered was 5.5 gallons per minute, and the lowest maximum flow rate—that is, the best flow rate the slowest model could achieve—was 3 gallons per minute. This would make watering your garden with the best-rated nozzle take about half as long as with our lowest-rated model.
