Sadly, this isn't your mother's (or more likely these days, grandmother's) 50lb vacuum that could suck up household's shag carpeting into the bag, follow it up with the pet cat and golden retriever, burp and ask loudly if it could have the baby next. We're firmly post "Think of the Children!" here, thank you very much. However, as tame and weak as it is, it is a rather powerful vacuum for this gilded day and age.
In my usage, if it could fit up the tube, this vacuum had no problem eating it. Litter, kitty crunchies, dirt, dust bunnies, hair, fur, pet dander, Legos, screws, unidentifiable detritus I'm too lazy to pick up or identify. This thing doesn't really care. It'll happily eat it. While I used it mostly on hardwood floors, it also did a wonderful job cleaning our few carpets, pulling far more dirt and hair out of them than our Roomba could ever hope to. Honestly, it did a better job on the rugs than the mains powered upright it's replacing.
It's also great for cleaning couches and upholstery and comes with a smaller powered head just for that. It did an amazing job of pulling all of the cat and dog hair our pets so lovingly deposited on the furniture for us.
And it does so somewhat quietly, With my Apple watch showing around 75db on medium and around 80db on High.
The floor head on this thing has a pair of rollers that are easy to remove for cleaning or detangling any long things that happen to get tangled in them. A nice touch and something that I've not seen on any vacuum except a Roomba. Ryobi claims it can eat hair up to 9 inches long without getting tangled too badly, and I've not had any problems with tangles yet. It's also got a nice powerful light to let you see clearly exactly how badly you've let your housekeeping go.
Probably the only real downsides to this vacuum are the bin's capacity and the vacuum's endurance.
The vacuum bin has a 1 liter dust bin which is... fine, but, unlike the floor head, I've found that the dust bin gets a bit fussy when you vacuum up a whole bunch of pet hair. When it thinks the bin is full, the unit shuts off and flashes red at you. It's fine, not a problem, just empty the bin and keep going, but if you have pets, you are going to have to empty the bin after every use and if you've let the housekeeping go a while, you may need to empty the bin once or twice during the vacuuming run as well.
Now we get to what might be either it's biggest strength or it biggest downfall, depending on how deep you are into Ryobi's ecosystem. This thing chews through battery like there is no tomarrow.
For shits and giggles, I ran the unit using a 2 Ah battery pack to get a rough power draw for each of the power levels. Why the small pack? Two reasons. First I figure that since Ryobi likes to put the smaller packs in pretty much every single kit they sell, that most folks in the Ryobi ecosystem will have more spare small packs than the larger packs. And second, I'm lazy and the smaller packs will die faster during testing. Upside, This should give us a rough, worst case estimate for endurance. If I've done my math correctly, High draws 12.3 W/min, Medium draws 3.7 W/min and low draws 2.25 W/min. Below is a table where I've extrapolated some rough run times. The times for the 2 Ah pack are the actual times I got.
The math was:
Wh / Runtime = W/min
| Battery |
High = 12 W/min |
Medium = 3.7 W/min |
Low = 2.25 W/min |
| 2 Ah = 36 Wh |
3 Min. |
10 Min |
16 Min |
| 4 Ah = 74 Wh |
6 Min |
20 Min |
32 Min |
| 6 AH = 108 Wh |
9 Min |
29 Min |
48 Min |
| 8 Ah = 144 Wh |
12 Min |
40 Min |
64 Min |
| 12 Ah = 216 Wh |
17 Min |
58 Min |
96 Min |
In practice, the battery in the kit did slightly better than the extrapolated values. I had no problem vacuuming the hardwood floors and carpets in our 1200 sq foot home and was then able to get halfway through vacuuming our furniture before the kit's battery played out. On it's default (medium) setting you can expect to get a bit over 20 minutes of run time with the 4 AH battery that comes in the kit. On high, that gets cut down to roughly 10 minutes. Upside, if you are already deep into the Ryobi ecosystem all you need to do is swap the pack for a fresh charge and keep going. Otherwise you will need to stop and let it recharge. Ryobi has done a solid on the charging front as well as the charger it comes with is a 105 W fast charger and is actually faster than the other chargers that I have.
Being a One+ tool, there is also nothing stopping you from upgrading to a larger battery if you find you need to. Except perhaps your wallet, the bigger batteries get expensive.
All in all, though, I like this vacuum. It's light weight, powerful and does an excelent job. But for what I paid for it, it damned well better last.
Now for the BIFL folks, while Ryobi has taken steps to prevent the motor on this thing from burning out, and replacement filters and rollers can be easily had, basically every single part is unobtainium. At least through official channels. Additionally, the floor head uses a flexable tube that is likely to crack over time leaking air pressure. While the tube is easily accessible for repair (duck tape, perhaps?), the lack of repair parts, lack of data sheets, and lack of repair documentation causes me to not recommend this vacuum for the BIFL crowd.
Fair enough. My wife calls it the "Half Assed Red Pasta". 😀