I spent three weekends scrubbing my driveway on my knees. Then my neighbour handed me a £30 nozzle and ruined my whole system.

I'll start with the embarrassing part. Our block paving hadn't been touched properly since we moved in, and by March it had gone that dark green colour that says nobody lives here who cares. My wife mentioned it once. Politely. Which in our house means it had been bothering her for about a year.

So I did what most people in a semi in South Yorkshire do. I bought a bottle of patio cleaner, a stiff broom, and I gave up three Saturdays to it. Bleach on the knees of my jeans, backache by eleven o'clock, and a driveway that looked marginally less grim from a distance. The grout lines were still black. The bit by the bins was still slimy.

I priced up a proper pressure washer. £180 for a decent one, plus somewhere to store it, plus dragging a cable out and hoping it doesn't rain. I nearly did it. Then Keith from number 14 — who is retired and therefore has strong opinions about outdoor equipment — leaned over the fence and told me I was being daft.

What Keith handed me over the fence

It was a chunky little spray gun. Rubberised black body, teal collar, brass fitting on the end. He'd screwed it onto his ordinary garden hose, no cable, no motor, nothing to plug in. The Pocket Hose Arrow. He'd bought two, apparently, because his daughter kept borrowing the first one.

The idea is straightforward: it narrows the water coming out of your existing hose into a tight, fast jet instead of the sad fan you get from a standard nozzle. Same water, much more concentrated force. It's not a pressure washer and it doesn't pretend to be — there's no pump inside. But for the sort of muck sitting on a domestic driveway, that turned out to be enough.

First go: the bit that annoyed me

Fitting it took me about ten seconds, which annoyed me because I'd mentally set aside an afternoon for faff. Unscrew old nozzle, screw this on, done. It went straight onto my standard hose connector without an adapter.

I pulled the trigger expecting a dribble and instead put a clean stripe across the paving in one pass. Not "slightly lighter". Clean. You can see the line in the photo above — I took that about four minutes in, because I genuinely wanted proof for Keith that I wasn't imagining it.

The whole front drive — roughly 40 square metres — took me under an hour, standing up, one hand, with a cup of tea going cold on the wall. The three weekends of scrubbing had achieved less than the first twenty minutes of this.

What's actually in the box

Mine arrived in five days in a plain box. The nozzle itself, four screw-in brass tips, and a little clip that holds it on the hose reel so it isn't rolling around the shed floor.

• Pinpoint tip — for the black lines between blocks and the corners the broom never reached.
• 45° tip — my default for concrete and paving. Fast without splattering you.
• Wide tip — the car, the decking, the plastic garden chairs. Gentler.
• Triple jet — fence panels and the shed. Covers ground quickly.

Six weeks in: what I'd tell a mate

It's been on the hose since May and it's had a proper going over. Here's the honest ledger.

What genuinely surprised me

• No cable, no petrol, no noise. I've cleaned at eight on a Sunday morning guilt-free.
• It reaches the gutter line from the ground, so no ladder for the worst of the gunk.
• The trigger locks, which matters when you're doing a whole drive in one go.
• It lives in a kitchen drawer. My father-in-law's pressure washer lives in his hall.

What I'd want you to know before buying

• Your results depend on your water pressure. Mine is good. My sister's flat in Leeds is weaker and hers is noticeably less punchy — still better than her old nozzle, but not the same.
• It will not strip years of hardened cement splash or paint. That's a job for a real machine or a professional.
• Wear something on your feet you don't mind ruining and keep it off soft mortar and old render.
• Check whether a hosepipe ban is in force in your area first. Ours came in July.

What the neighbours said

Would I buy it again?

Yes, and I already have — I bought a second one for my mum's bungalow, which is the most sincere review I know how to give. It cost me less than the patio cleaner and the broom did across those three lost weekends, and it did the job properly the first time.

If your drive has gone green and the thought of another Saturday on your knees is putting you off, this is the cheapest thing I've found that actually shifts it. The retailer was running a discount and free tips when I ordered, and it was still on at the time of writing.