Don’t buy garden hoses with aluminum fittings — generally silver colored instead of brass.\u00a0 These fittings will corrode and seize to your hose nozzles, sprinklers, and faucets.\u00a0 They then have to be cut off and generally ruin the mating part.\u00a0 Existing hoses can be salvaged by cutting off the aluminum fittings and installing brass fittings available from any hardware store.<\/p>\n
Also, try to avoid aluminum in electrical fittings and switches.\u00a0 The aluminum eventually forms a surface oxide layer that causes open and\/or intermittent circuits and, in some cases, fires.\u00a0 Years ago there was a brief effort to use aluminum wire in residential wiring before the fire hazard was recognized.\u00a0 It is hard to avoid aluminum in cheap lamp sockets but the effort will be worth it.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 At another time, my garage door manual button stopped working — the remotes worked fine.\u00a0 This was eventually traced to the use by the manufacturer of an aluminum washer under a terminal riveted to a circuit board.\u00a0 There was no visible corrosion, just an invisible oxide layer that formed under the rivet head.\u00a0 A bit of solder bridging over the washer from the terminal to the board cured the problem.<\/p>\n
Aluminum is great for cookware and airplanes.\u00a0 Not so much for water fittings or electrical connections.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
P.S.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The solid brass fittings should say so.\u00a0 Any weasel words like brass color, brass filled, or brass plated should raise a red flag.\u00a0 Generally brass fittings are machined compared to plated zinc which is usually molded.\u00a0 Brass is over 3 time heavier than aluminum.\u00a0 You can tell the difference as aluminum just feels lighter.\u00a0 Brass is only 20% heavier than zinc but you can usually tell zinc by the mold marks.\u00a0 If you have a scale you can use it to determine the density (specific gravity), and thus material of a fitting:<\/p>\n\n\n
Material Specific density g\/cc<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aluminum 2.7<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Brass 8.5<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Steel (stainless) 7.9<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Zinc 7.1<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Don’t buy garden hoses with aluminum fittings — generally silver colored instead of brass.\u00a0 These fittings will corrode and seize to your hose nozzles, sprinklers, and faucets.\u00a0 They then have to be cut off and generally ruin the mating part.\u00a0 Existing hoses can be salvaged by cutting off the aluminum fittings and installing brass fittings … Continue reading “Garden hose”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[41],"class_list":["post-324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-aluminum-connections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.irrelevant-tech.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.irrelevant-tech.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.irrelevant-tech.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irrelevant-tech.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irrelevant-tech.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=324"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.irrelevant-tech.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":894,"href":"https:\/\/www.irrelevant-tech.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324\/revisions\/894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.irrelevant-tech.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irrelevant-tech.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irrelevant-tech.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}