Sticky wall hooks, heavy duty is on thirteen titles and a weight is on none

Fourteen self adhesive wall hooks, the kind you stick up instead of drilling. Cheap, genuinely useful, and sold almost entirely on two words.

Thirteen of the fourteen titles say heavy duty. Not one title says how much weight it holds.

That is the finding this page started with. Then I opened the photographs, and it turned into a more interesting one.

The specification exists. It is just not in the words.

No title gives a weight. No title gives a size. No title names a wall surface.

The pictures give all three.

I opened the photographs of eight of these fourteen, which is the six this page recommends, one it deliberately does not, and one taken off this site since. Of those eight, four print a load figure across a product shot, five print their dimensions, and two print a list of which walls they work on and which they do not. The remaining six I have not opened, so treat the counts below as what half the shelf does rather than all of it.

The one taken off this site was a stainless hook titled 3M, with its adhesive pad printed 3M in its own photograph. 3M is a manufacturer’s mark, and a marketplace listing that carries it is not one this site repeats.

None of that is searchable, sortable or comparable. It sits in a JPEG, which means the one specification that decides the purchase is invisible to every way a shopper actually narrows a list down. So the practical advice for this shelf is simple and slightly annoying: the titles are the advertising and the images are the datasheet. Scroll the images.

Three say ten kilograms. One says a hundred pounds.

Here is what the four of those eight that print a load actually claim.

Three of the four agree, and the third is the same figure written in pounds. Ten kilograms from a stuck-on pad the size of a large postage stamp is a believable claim. It is a winter coat and a bag, and it is roughly what the better known brands of this kind of hook claim for a similar pad.

The fourth says a hundred pounds. Four and a half times what the other three say, on a pad of the same sort of size.

The same listing prints fall free guarantee and fifty year durability across its other photographs.

That is the shape worth learning, because it turns up everywhere on this site: the outsized number and the outsized promise travel together. A seller willing to guarantee something for fifty years is a seller for whom the words cost nothing, and the load figure is coming from the same place. It is a perfectly ordinary looking black hook and it may well be fine for a coat. It is simply not a hook I am going to repeat a forty five kilogram claim for, so it is not picked.

Work out the price per hook, because nothing else compares

Five of the fourteen give a straight count you can divide into the price. Here they are, on the day this was written.

About three pence at one end and over two pounds at the other.

Some of that gap is real: the dearest is a locking metal towel hook and the cheapest per unit is a small clear one, and those are different objects. But no title tells you which is which. Five of the eight I opened print their dimensions in a photograph, in inches and centimetres, and the rest leave you judging scale from a hook against a blank wall.

Twenty eight hooks cost less than twelve

Look at the middle rows again.

One listing sells twenty eight hooks. Another sells twelve. The twenty eight pack is the cheaper of the two, and both say heavy duty, and neither says anything else that would explain it.

Four of them will not tell you what you are buying

Four listings are sold as a range: five, ten, twenty or fifty pieces, or ten, twenty or thirty.

The price on the front belongs to one of those options and the title does not say which. It is usually the smallest, because that is what puts a listing highest in a price sort, but you cannot tell from the title and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Those four are not comparable on price per hook until you open them and read the options. That removes four of fourteen from the one comparison that works.

The wall decides this, and two listings say so

Every one of these fourteen lists rooms. Kitchen, bathroom, door, ceiling, office. The room is not what decides whether an adhesive hook works. The wall is, and thirteen titles are silent on it.

Two listings are not. The best overall pick prints two columns in its fourth photograph:

• Will stick: marble, ceramic tile, wood, glass, metal, other smooth surfaces
• Will not stick: lime wall, uneven wall, dirty wall, brick

The black stainless hook does the same in pictures, ticking ceramic, mosaic, glass, painted panels, metal and wooden doors and crossing out painted walls, rough plaster and fragile wallpaper.

That is correct, it is useful, and it is the reason the first of them is the pick at the top of this page. To it I would add the ones that catch people in British houses in particular:

• woodchip or textured paper, where the adhesive touches only the high points
• any wallpaper, because the paper lets go of the wall before the hook lets go of the paper
• emulsion painted in the last month, which is still curing
• chalky or distempered plaster, which comes away as a layer
• anything dusty, which is most garage and shed walls

Two of the eight I opened do say the other thing that matters, and it is worth repeating because it is the commonest cause of failure: give it twelve hours before you hang anything on it. Pressure sensitive adhesive keeps gaining grip for most of a day, and most of the failures people blame on a cheap hook are a hook that was loaded twenty minutes after it went up.

One listing goes further and is the only one here that does. Its images show you washing the pad under a tap and drying it with a hairdryer to bring the glue back, which means these are meant to be moved and reused rather than thrown away. That is a real feature and it is, again, nowhere in the words.

If you take one thing from this page

Ignore heavy duty. It is on thirteen of the fourteen, which makes it worth nothing as a way of telling them apart.

Then do the three things the titles will not do for you. Open the images and look for a load figure. Divide the price by the number of hooks. Buy a small pack first and find out what your own wall does before you commit to two hundred.