5 Ryobi Yard Tools Users Say You Should Steer Clear Of

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Keeping your yard in shape can be a lot of work, so you want to make sure you have good tools from a quality brand that you can rely on. One of the more popular options out there is the Home Depot-affiliated manufacturer, Ryobi. The brand has hundreds of gardening and landscaping products available, ranging from corded and gas-powered tools to cordless options that run on Ryobi’s USB Lithium, 18V, 40V, and 80V battery systems. The sheer size of the library of tools is one of the biggest selling points for the brand, as it means that you will have plenty of options available once you commit to a battery system. Better yet, Ryobi releases new tools for your garage and yard year after year.

Ryobi isn’t exactly known for making the most powerful tools on the market, but it is extremely popular in the DIY community due to its high cost-to-performance ratio. Fans have claimed that these green tools will give you 90% of the performance offered by premium brands at half the price. 

That said, even the best cordless yard tool brands miss the mark from time to time, and some of these tools might not be as good as others. Ryobi products rarely fall below 4 stars on the Home Depot website, so one that dips into the mid-3s is a pretty strong indicator that there might be some kind of issue that buyers would want to steer clear of. By taking a look at Ryobi’s lowest-rated yard tools and seeing what users have had to say about them, you can get a better idea about which of the company’s products are best avoided and why.

If you live in an area where many leaves fall in autumn, then getting a quality mulcher can save you a lot of time and effort. It’s also a great way to gather leaves and start breaking them down if you want to use them for compost. Ryobi makes a tool called the Vac Attack Cordless Leaf Vacuum/Mulcher, which goes for $149 and is powered by the brand’s 40V battery system.

This is an interesting tool. It has a heavy-duty vacuum extension on plastic wheels that sucks up lawn debris, passing it through a metal impeller to mulch it before passing it into an attached bag. Ryobi states that this can compact as much as 16 bags of lawn debris down to one. It doesn’t have the longest run-time, but at least it promises 30 minutes on a 4Ah battery. It also has a variable speed dial that allows you to control airflow.

The item was rated 3.1 stars out of 5 on the Ryobi site and 3.4 on Home Depot, with only 62% of reviewers stating that they would recommend it to other buyers. A major complaint is that, while the suction hose has wheels on it, the waste bag simply hangs from the handle. This means that the user has to bear the weight of the gathering mulch. Customers have also complained about having trouble emptying the bag once it’s full, issues with the wheels breaking, and problems with the bag’s seams coming apart. Some have also reported clogging issues. Even though the vacuuming or mulching mechanisms appear to work as intended, there are a slew of other reported issues that appear to have made users feel that the tool simply isn’t worth the headache.

The general rule of thumb for lawn maintenance is that you need three tools: a mower, a trimmer, and an edger. But there are a lot of people out there who only have a small lawn and might not want to invest a ton of money and storage space into three separate tools. This is where the Ryobi ONE+ 18-Volt 12-inch Cordless 3-in-1 Trim Mower might seem like a good idea. It combines all three tools into a single compact and affordable design.

The tool works similarly to the Ryobi Expand-It Attachment System. It has a telescoping power head where you attach the battery. This can be connected to separate attachments, including a pivoting 10- to 12-inch string trimmer with an auto-feed line head that can also function as an edger and a specialized 12-inch mower deck. This easily disconnects via a step release on the back, and it has four-position single point height adjustment (ranging from 1 ½-inches to 3 ½-inches).

It retails for $199 and boasts a respectable 4.1 out of 5 stars on the Ryobi site, where it had just over 50 reviews at the time of this writing. Unfortunately, the score is much lower on Home Depot, where it has over 600 reviews. Here, it only has a 3.5-star rating, with just 62% of customers claiming that they would recommend it. Why? Several users have had issues with the tool’s durability. It seems that the place where the power head attaches to the mower deck is a common breaking point. Multiple others have also complained that several of the plastic components in the string trimmer attachment break easily. The general consensus appears to be that it can adequately handle light-duty work for a while, but you shouldn’t expect it to last more than a year or two.

There are a lot of different kinds of pressure washers out there, and not all of them need to be able to blast the paint off your deck. Some people just want something for washing off lawn furniture and house siding once or twice a year. In those cases, a handheld washer could be a solid option. However, users aren’t exactly sold on the Ryobi ONE+ 18V EZClean 320 PSI 0.8 GPM Cold Water Power Cleaner despite the fact that it retails for just $49.

This is a tankless 320 PSI 0.8 GPM power washer that has three different ways of sourcing water. You can connect it to a siphon hose that can draw water out of a bucket, a 2-liter bottle adaptor, or directly to a garden hose. This, coupled with the fact that it’s cordless, might be enticing to those who want to power wash objects that are far from water sources and power outlets.

This is another one where we see some discrepancies in the ratings, though. The tool has a 4.2 rating on Ryobi’s site, but it only has a 3.6 on Home Depot, with a 73% recommendation rate. The cause of this high number of negative reviews primarily boils down to a single failure point. There have been multiple reports of the water connection port breaking clean off the tool. “I love most of my Ryobi tools, but not this one,” said one user. “The piece of plastic where the hose connects has a plastic wall that is less than 1/16″ thick. When it snaps off, as it inevitably will, the tool is useless.” 

Chopping up soil for cultivation is back-breaking work that can be made much easier with the use of a motorized tiller. One option you might see while walking the aisles of your local Home Depot is the Ryobi 40V HP Brushless 18-inch Rear Tine Tiller. This one retails for a whopping $999, so you can be sure that customers will want it to be worth the investment.

The Ryobi Rear Line Tiller is a heavy duty piece of equipment that is designed to tear through hard earth quickly and efficiently, with Ryobi stating that it “delivers more power than a 208cc gas tiller.” Promising to cultivate up to 3,000 square feet per charge, it has a variable speed, a self-propelling mechanism, and a Transport Mode for moving the tiller without engaging the tines. Additionally, it comes with a nine-position depth adjustment stake and a side shield that protects existing plants from debris thrown by the tiller.

It has a 4.1 rating on the Ryobi site and a 3.6 on Home Depot, with just 68% of customers claiming that they would recommend it. This seems to primarily come down to a couple of issues. Some customers complained that the tool isn’t able to handle dense soil, stating that the batteries pop out when the tool is under load and that it isn’t able to adequately till their land. Another common complaint has to do with the shear pins. These are a deliberate weak point in the design, meant to break when the tiller hits a rock to protect the engine. However, some users have complained that the pins break far too easily, with one customer stating it broke on a 1-inch thick grape vine, and another saying it broke in damp soil.

The final item on our list is the only one that is gas-powered. The Ryobi 3300 PSI 2.4 GPM Cold Water Gas Pressure Washer is powered by a 212cc Carb Compliant Engine, giving it a pretty decent amount of horsepower. It has specialized idle-down tech that allows it to burns less fuel and operate significantly quieter. It has a hand-truck frame with 12-inch wheels, a 0.95-gallon fuel tank, and an onboard soap tank. It also comes with four nozzles: soap, 25-degree, 40-degree, and a second story extension nozzle for cleaning high areas without the need for a ladder. These attach via a quick-connect coupler and can be stashed in the washer’s onboard storage when they’re not in use.

The washer retails for $399. It has been rated 4.1 stars on the Ryobi site and 3.8 stars on Home Depot. What’s really interesting, however, is that only 27% of customers recommend it. Even more odd is that there doesn’t appear to be one single issue that stands out as a primary culprit. Constant engine stalling appears to be the most common complaint, but one person had a wheel break, another has the host fitting break, a third had leaky water valves, a fourth had an oil leak right out of the box, and a fifth had it fail to create pressure altogether. These appears to speak more to a general lack of quality control than to any specific failing in the design.

Ryobi is generally considered to be a trustworthy and reliable brand. The vast majority of its tools are generally well-regarded among consumers and their customer rating scales generally reflect that. In order to find the weakest yard tools in Ryobi’s lineup, I started by organizing the Ryobi Yard Tools section on the Home Depot website by customer rating, and then looking at the tools that ranked lowest. I used the Home Depot site for this as well, as it generally has a larger review pool than the Ryobi site.

Once I had a handful of the lowest-rated yard tools picked out, I examined each of their specifications to illustrate their intended performance metrics. I then looked at the most critical reviews to see if there were any repeated complaints that could indicate a design flaw or failure of performance that caused the tool’s score to be dragged down. This way, readers can be forewarned as to the nature of any weaknesses that these tools might have and make their buying decisions accordingly.