Garden hose

Don’t buy garden hoses with aluminum fittings — generally silver colored instead of brass.  These fittings will corrode and seize to your hose nozzles, sprinklers, and faucets.  They then have to be cut off and generally ruin the mating part.  Existing hoses can be salvaged by cutting off the aluminum fittings and installing brass fittings available from any hardware store.

Also, try to avoid aluminum in electrical fittings and switches.  The aluminum eventually forms a surface oxide layer that causes open and/or intermittent circuits and, in some cases, fires.  Years ago there was a brief effort to use aluminum wire in residential wiring before the fire hazard was recognized.  It is hard to avoid aluminum in cheap lamp sockets but the effort will be worth it.  As a couple of personal examples: our son kept fighting an intermittent ceiling light — replacing bulbs, switch, and breaker — until I swapped out the old aluminum lamp socket.  At another time, my garage door manual button stopped working — the remotes worked fine.  This was eventually traced to the use by the manufacturer of an aluminum washer under a terminal riveted to a circuit board.  There was no visible corrosion, just an invisible oxide layer that formed under the rivet head.  A bit of solder bridging over the washer from the terminal to the board cured the problem.

Aluminum is great for cookware and airplanes.  Not so much for water fittings or electrical connections.

 

P.S.  Since I posted this the Chinese have noticed people catching on and they are now coloring their aluminum and zinc hose fittings to look like brass.  The solid brass fittings should say so.  Any weasel words like brass color, brass filled, or brass plated should raise a red flag.  Generally brass fittings are machined compared to plated zinc which is usually molded.  Brass is over 3 time heavier than aluminum.  You can tell the difference as aluminum just feels lighter.  Brass is only 20% heavier than zinc but you can usually tell zinc by the mold marks.  If you have a scale you can use it to determine the density (specific gravity), and thus material of a fitting:

Material Specific density g/cc

Aluminum 2.7

Brass 8.5

Steel (stainless) 7.9

Zinc 7.1