Topic: Gardeners are overcharged ?

[picman]

I just wanted to extend a hose pipe.. You know the ones with yellow push fit ends,,, and needed a male to male adaptor, having checked local retailers,, etc , £4.99 was the best price... Mmm seems like gardeners are easy prey for being overcharged ... Today I found virtually same thing for £1 ... { rant over }

[Beersmith]

Sometimes it is hard to avoid being ripped off.

But if you fear that is about to happen, the best thing to do, is do as you did. Do not make it easy for them. Shop around, search the internet, and check for alternatives. In the end you got a fair price.

[Paulh]

I've got a number of better priced alternative hose pipe fittings in my garage. Unfortunately, as they aren't exactly the same thing, they mostly don't work properly either.

[picman]

" Dont work properly " I had that ... try  taking them to a wholesale plumber and get some bigger / better O rings.. should be a few pence..

[Vinlander]

I used to work in a lab and a lot of the equipment was imperial sizes, plus metric and quite a lot of weird ones purely because:  "we make it this size so we are the only source of spares".

We bought very few O rings from the official source - we bought a few big ones of different gauges from everyday sources and cut them up to suit. It's amazing how good superglue is at joining that kind of rubber - though you have to use a single edge razor blade to make a clean cut, preferably at an angle of 45^o (though it would be asking for glued fingers to use them bare  - use polythene - putting your finger and thumb in the corners of a PE bag is good enough).

Cheers.