As an American home owner, I have a lot of Ryobi cordless tools, so when we shopped for our first stick vac I thought it made sense to get theirs to share the batteries.
Nearly a year later I've had it with the stupid thing. Performance is adequate at best on hard floors and downright embarrassing on carpet.
Nearly ever seal and gasket on the stick portions and the canister have torn or failed. I've kept it limping a long with 3D printed TPU seals.
Now the brush head is having electrical issues.
RYOBI has been out of EVERY part for months and tell me every time I ask they don't have an ETA and try to order later.
Lesson learned. Avoid these things like the plague.
The cordless market is so saturated it's overwhelming. Id like something that can be adapted to use Ryobi batteries, but it's not a deal breaker.
Any suggestions where to start my research? What brands actually have good performance, reliability, and parts availability? Sub $500 preferred, but willing to flex a bit
It was great for about a month, even if it had lackluster performance. Maybe the other low tier models are magically better, but engineering/design and support are so poor.
Coming from someone deep in the Ryobi ecosystem, avoid their stick vacs at all cost.
I question how fixable these Ryobi Stick Vacs are - there are very few teardown videos (mostly older models) and aftermarket spare parts, unlike DeWalt but DeWalt doesn't make home vacs (they make shop vacs, which I have the DCV501LN which is excellent).
Family has the R18XSV9 Pet Stick vacuum with the R18XSV3-FH3 beater bar/motorised head unit. After about (less) than 2 years, the head's hose tore from repeated flexing. Pretty poor quality hose really. Couldn't tape it as the Y shaped plastic encasing made it inaccessible.
Even worse, there is no official replacement for the hose, and Ryobi claims the head is a consumable (which is why there are no spare parts for it apart from the rotating brushes). A new replacement head is 1/4 the price of the vacuum, which is really stupid when one of the cheapest parts of the head is prone to early failure, leaving the head unusable.
I quite like the replaceable batteries, but I wouldn't quite recommend them to anyone. Perhaps I'd change my mind if more fix-it videos come about or Ryobi starts providing more spare parts and instructions to replace parts.
I am glad that when I was shopping for a shop vac, I did not go for the RHV18X and went with the DCV501LN instead.
I'm pretty dazzled with my Ryobi pet vac. Nothing to adjust when going from hardwood to deep shag area rugs and it takes up so little space. Literally no dog smell exhausts from it either. For a third the price this thing is superior to my Miele pet canister and includes a light which the nearly $700 vac didn't have.
I tried a Dyson once and was thoroughly unimpressed. Not only are the batteries trash but the suction was garbage. For those fucking price tags stay as far away from Dyson as possible.
That said, I now use a Ryobi 18V stick vacuum *only* because I already had a bunch of 18V tools so I already had the batteries. The suction is solid and the battery life is pretty decent. It’s a well designed machine albeit a bit heavy. If you don’t already have Ryobi gear something more conventional is probably prudent.
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