Hose Reel Repair

I finally got around to repairing my Eley Hose Reel. I purchased the Eley Portable Garden Hose Reel Cart back in 2020 after I got weary of storing my garden hoses and needed a better way to keep them stashed. The previous cheap “plastic” storage reel kept leaking and proved hard to roll up with each passing year.

Apparently a common point of failure on the original Eley hose reels was the brass swivel. Extreme cold temperatures would cause the fittings to expand and contract, which basically caused leaks starting in 2022. The fitting finally broke off in 2023, which rendered the reel rather useless. I was able to troubleshoot my swivel issues and determined that it had been subjected to that expansion, whereby the swivel fittings had broken loose.

The new brass swivel took about 15 minutes to install; instructions on how to replace the part were clearly printed on the box. A YouTube video also helped clarify the replacement process. Once I swapped out the parts, the swivel worked perfectly with no leaks and I was back in business again.

Instructions on the box, the old swivel
Some disassembly required
The new swivel
Repair complete!

Where did my website go

I lost my plant-based website a few months ago, but didn’t realize that the hosting provider had deleted my instance until recently. When my integrations started complaining, I did some troubleshooting and discovered the loss. Yes, I should have paid more attention to the fact that a change in billing would have affected my host’s auto pay. But unfortunately the notifications stopped coming…because MX records for my mail host were also being hosted at the hosting provider.

Sadly, I came to discover that everything had been deleted, including my backups due to the length of time that the bill had not been paid (approximately 3 months). I had to start a new cloud instance and reload LAMP/WordPress install from scratch. There are few more tasks to do before my site is full resurrected again; so if something breaks, please be patient while I fix it.

Ah well, it was nice to re-learn everything again!