Air Hose Reel

Retractable Air Hose Reel

Chances are you don’t have a retractable air hose reel already, because reality is, you wouldn’t be on this website if you already did have one.  However, just in case you don’t, we’re going to cover it here anyways.  A retractable air hose reel is a reel for your air hoses.  By air hose, we’re referring to the hose that is designed to handle high air pressures, and less than desirable atmosphere that a shop or garage will see.  These hoses are used to attach your power air tools to your air compressor.

Without an air hose you’d have no way of getting the air to your power tools.  Unfortunately, this air hose can be a bane in your side as well.  They often get tangled, are hard to manage, and can just make a mess of your shop if you don’t wrap it up out of the way.  The problem is, one you’re done using it, the last thing you’re usually worried about is wrapping up the hose, you’re just wanting to get to the next task on your project.

This is where the retractable air hose reel comes in to play.  With a simple snug on the air hose it can automatically retract in to a reel, feeding in and wrapping around the reel in a neat fashion.  No more worries about tripping over your hose. No more concerns over dropping something and puncturing your hose.  No more mess.

Depending on your individual needs, you will need to decide between a retractable air hose reel and a manual hose reel.  A manual hose reel requires that you manually crank on a handle to wrap the hose around the reel mechanism.  This type of hose reel is very affordable.  Unfortunately it will usually end up leading to the same problem as not having a hose reel.  Many times you will tend not to bother with it because then you have to walk over, hand crank, and feed the line on to the reel.  This is almost as inconvenient as not having a reel at all!

Fortunately a retractable air hose reel offers much more flexibility.  They are design to automatically retract the hose with a simple tug on the end.  They lock the hose in place with a ratcheting mechanism.  Then when you are done using it, you just give it a tug.  The tightly wound spring inside the reel will automatically pull the hose back in for you.

Retractable air hose reels also offers the excellent benefit of being able to mount it in tighter locations.  When you mount a manual reel you have to add a lot of extra room for the cranking mechanism to spin both when you wind and unwind it.  Usually this means that they are stationary mount and can’t hinge on the wall, because then the crank would hit the wall. 

However, a retractable air hose reel can be mounted in a tighter space, and also will pivot at the wall mount.  This means regardless of where you are in the garage, your hose will easily be pulled back in.  No more worries about that tangled hose.