I Converted to Cordless Power Tools - Should You?

A decade+ after my first non-wired drill started smoking, I stepped back into the cordless fold via a brand I had long ruled out. The results were... actually quite good!

Rewind back ~15 years and I was excited to install a surround sound system in our new house. Not wanting to drag an extension cord through the attic, I took my cordless blue Ryobi drill with me on my journey above the walls, and proceeded to drill a hole through the horizontal wood section where I needed to run wires¹.

Unfortunately, the (nearly new) drill ran out of juice before I completed the hole. After another charge, it started smoking on its next use attempt, never to function again. I then purchased a DeWalt corded drill,² never(?) to look back.

Gradually, I obtained other DeWalt-branded tools that I hung on a pegboard as a “DeWall.” I even had my (current) garage in Florida wired with extra outlets for easy plug-in access.

Back to cordless tools? Back to cordless tools!

Fast-forward to around 3 years ago and I needed a bunk bed.³ This meant creating dovetails (i.e. rectangular recessions) in lumber with a handheld circular saw. A handheld (now green) cordless Ryobi saw, along with a drill and battery, were available at a reasonable price. So, after a decade of resisting cordless tools (and this brand specifically) I hesitantly took the plunge.

To my surprise, I couldn’t be happier.

Why go cordless? [My experience]

TL;DR: Speed cutting at different locations

If you need to make a cut/hole/sand over and over in the same place, nothing beats a plug-in tool that never runs out of batteries. However, if you need to move from place to place (especially outside) to perform more intermittent operations, the time and hassle of plugging your tool in, unplugging it when done, and physically avoiding the cord is a significant time cost with respect to the rest of the operation.

The cordless drill, which I saw at the time as a kind of nice-to-have bonus, turned out to be extremely useful. I keep it beside my wall-mounted bank of batteries and chargers as a (mostly) full cordless convert. Just pull the drill out, put the drill bit, driver, etc in and it’s ready to go. Pop the battery out and exchange with the charger and you’ve got a “fresh set of downs” so to speak.

After my previous Ryobi/cordless experience described earlier, I was not a fan of this brand. In fact, when I posted this video about a Ryobi Drill mount that I made, a family member called me to ask if they had paid me to promote their tools.

They had not⁴. And at the time I wasn’t sure what kind of lifespan I was going to get out of these tools, but after 3 years they are still working quite well. My friend Alex had mentioned that “the green Ryobi” was actually pretty good some time before. I was skeptical, but at this point I’m a convert to cordless tools and Ryobi, even if I keep my plug-in tools around just in case!

My 3D-printed cordless drill mount

Also: disaster prepping

Last summer/fall here in Florida we had not one, but two, hurricanes hit at our location, followed by flooding that left our house as a private island. The good news is that we didn’t loose power, and that our general stocking-up-at-Costco-once-every-2-weeks, plus my previously lambasted Ramen noodle supply mean that we didn’t go hungry.⁵

At the same time, having a portable power supply with lots of juice ready to go was reassuring, as was the ability to saw up boards and/or screw them into place if needed. There are all kinds of accessories that work with these power packs, and keeping several charged at all is somewhat reassuring.

Cordless drawbacks?

As alluded to earlier, if you’re going to be doing the same operation over and over in the same place, the inconvenience of changing/charging batteries will soon exceed the convenience of not having to plug it in.

Batteries also wear out over time and need to be disposed of, creating expense and hassle. I recommend writing the date that you got a particular battery so that you can track which packs might be ready for “retirement.”

Vendor lock-in is also a good and a bad thing. Since I have Ryobi battery packs and chargers, using a different brand is somewhat inconvenient. At the same time, the tools themselves aren’t too expensive sans batteries, and it’s nice to have a single power brick for everything, so I’d call this a net positive.

I also have a small Milwaukee rotary tool that I got for a review. It is very good, but I rarely use it, in part because it’s not part of my typical Ryobi ecosystem and I just don’t think of it.

Why are cordless tools now OK?

The easy answer here is that battery technology has made a huge jump in the last decade or so, from NiCad or NiMH batteries to superior Li-ion technology.

What’s neat from a personal perspective is that my friend EZ actually worked on Ryobi’s tools as a design engineer at the time. He’s fairly humble about taking Ryobi tools from not-so-good blue devices to the now-quite-good light green models, attributing this to overall technological advances.

Of course, one could wrightly⁶ say that brothers Wilbur and Orville could only make their first flight because of advances in lightweight combustion engines.⁷ While true, somebody has to do the job, and take the credit, even if an improvement is only possible because of other advances.

Also, Vacuum Cleaners (dogs may disagree)

Evie, the dog, does not like the Dyson vacuum cleaner, but no longer bites it.

I bought a cordless Dyson vacuum cleaner some time before my Ryobi journey, and it’s really nice⁸. Being able to go from room to room without plugging it in or worrying about where the cord is makes the task of vacuuming almost fun. Maybe I should taken this lesson and applied it to power tools earlier!

Notably, there are adapters to use Ryobi battery packs with Dyson vacuums (example, not sure this one works with mine). This would be very convenient, but you can’t charge it with the default Dyson cradle, so that’s a deal-breaker for me.

Key takaways:

• Cordless tools can be awesome - don’t be afraid!

• Ryobi tools are much improved - Still reasonably priced, and with a great tool ecosystem for your battery packs

• Apply lessons from X to Y - If the cordless vacuum is awesome, maybe I should have applied this lesson to my tools

• Don’t rule things out forever - Between Alex’s defense of Ryobi, my friend EZ actually designing Ryobi tools, and their green rebranding, I should have given them another look. Sometimes things change, for that matter sometimes people change. Know when to extend a second chance.

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Thanks for reading! I hope you will follow along as I post weekly about engineering, technology, making, and projects. Fair warning: I am a native Florida man, and may get a little off-topic in the footnotes. Maybe I even had an alligator or two as pets growing up. Perhaps they are alive today and could be used to test earth-wormhole pet friendliness. -JC

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Addendum/Footnotes:

1. This house (in South Carolina) had a MASSIVE attic, which I could fully stand up in, and which was accessible via a small door in our bonus room over the garage. While I like our current house, it has the very cramped attic typical of Florida construction (and it’s’s very hot here), so I don’t exactly poke around up there much.

2. I had what appeared to be the same model at work for several years, and it always served me well there. Really good tools IMO.

Re: Ryobi smoking - IIRC. It definitely started smoking, though I’m not certain of the charge order.

3. For my kids. I wanted to buy one, but wasn’t satisfied with store options. Roughly 3 years these tools helped me build yet another bunk bed using my same design.

4. But they can! hi@jeremyscook.com if you’d like to discuss sponsorship opportunities.

5. Also, we were in Tallahassee directly preceding the second hurricane, and were able to deliberately stock up on necessities. This might be the subject of an upcoming post. Actually here you go 👇

6. I couldn’t resist

7. Which itself was only possible because of advances in metallurgy and precision machining. One might argue that no one invents something. Inventors just happen to be at the natural confluence of technologies.

8. I did recently have to replace it, but that’s a different story.