10 Tools We Wish Ryobi Never Discontinued

You may know Ryobi from your trips to Home Depot. The toolmaker sells its stuff exclusively at Home Depot or online from their official website. The company was founded in 1943 in Hiroshima, Japan. It originally built things for the Japanese military but switched over to tools and other consumer-facing products after the war ended. Decades later, you can find their tools all over Home Depot in its instantly recognizable neon yellow coloring. You'll see them in most aisles too because Ryobi makes a lot of stuff.

Over the years, the company has made dozens, if not hundreds of tools and other products. Some of them are better than others but you can find a ton of different things. They're known as an inexpensive brand that still makes decent products so they're best suited for things like tailgate parties or DIY home projects. In my experience, at least, Ryobi tools last a pretty good while. My Ryobi lawnmower is now five years old, and since the batteries are interchangeable, I also picked up a leaf blower and string trimmer. They all still run great to this day.

Since the company makes a little bit of everything, it's inevitable that some home run products are simply not available anymore. Here is a list of products that, if Ryobi brought them back, would be very useful to have. For the most part, these tools are part of Ryobi's One+ system, which saw the company dabble with all sorts of unique tools but ultimately discarded them for various reasons. 

The first product we'll talk about is the Ryobi One+ Hybrid LED Cable Lights. It's quite a long name for a simple premise. It's a string of bright lights that you can hang up and then use a battery in main compartment to turn the lights on. Generally speaking, people like their lights hardwired and connected to a switch of some sort, so it's understandable that this product didn't take off. However, there are some use cases where it might have been useful. 

One instance is as an attic light. String up the lights and put the battery base next to the door or crawlspace entrance. Then, when you access the attic, pop a battery in and your attic is lit up. The lights reportedly got pretty bright, so you could light a whole room with it if you wanted to. Emergency situations where the power goes out is another decent use case for something like this. Camper lighting, lighting while camping, and other such activities would've also been a nice spot for these. 

Whatever the case may be, Ryobi doesn't sell these anymore and it's a shame because they are quite useful for the niche they target. Reviews on the product on Ryobi's website are basically all people begging the company to bring them back again. Fortunately, the brand has other lights you can still buy.

The Ryobi Ultra-Quiet Garage Door Opener is another neat product that was surprisingly well-liked by the people who own it. What made this one nice is that it had a battery backup so it would continue to work when the rest of your house's power didn't. There was a also a bright LED on the bottom to light up the garage when it opened and, reportedly, it was quite quiet. People seem to like it and have requested that Ryobi bring it back again.

It's probably not going to happen. The reason Ryobi stopped selling the garage door opener is because the company lost a patent lawsuit from The Chamberlain Group, which owns a number of garage door opener companies. The lawsuit resulted in a permanent injunction of the Ryobi Garage Door Opener, which means we'll probably never see it again as the courts have banned the company from selling them after 2023. It's possible that Ryobi could produce a garage door opener that doesn't break any patents but that's likely a lot harder than it sounds. 

An unfortunate side effect is that Ryobi has begun not supporting its garage door openers anymore, resulting in users who have lost some of the features of their garage door openers. Since those don't get replaced terribly often, it's a sad state of affairs for current owners. 

The Ryobi 18V One+ Xenon Hi-Beam is an interesting flashlight because the light is the same Xenon light they put in vehicle high beams. It boasted a 2,800 lumen light with a lock button that allowed users to hold the light on without needing to hold the trigger. Like many other Ryobi products, this one took an 18V battery that would let the light run for 90 continuous minutes. If you ever wanted to temporarily light up an entire backyard with light, this was a quick and effective way to do it.

Unlike many of Ryobi's products, this one not being a best seller makes a little bit of sense. The light was absurdly bright, limiting its usefulness to only those who needed tremendously bright lights, and it wasn't small enough to take with you like a military-style flashlight would be. Plus, the light got middling reviews on Amazon due to light consistency issues. The housing also wasn't made to shine the line a super far distance like a tactical flashlight, so while it was very bright, it also petered out quite quickly.

Even so, a revised version of this flashlight with Ryobi's current battery tech would make for a nice light to have during emergencies like power outages or while crawling around somewhere like an attic or crawl space.

An auto hammer is a pretty fun tool all on its own. For the uninitiated, it's a power tool that hammers for you. You just line it up and press the trigger. Ryobi's Auto Hammer is the only such tool that we could find in Ryobi's recent history of tool making and it's a shame that there isn't another one. In addition to being discontinued entirely, it's also quite difficult to find a 12V Ryobi-branded battery, so if anyone still owns this thing, they have to buy third-party.

It mostly looks like a power drill and has a few of the same features, including a light so you can see what you're hammering. It also uses the same batteries that Ryobi drills did back then. There was also a magnetic head that would hold the nail until you could line it up and start driving it in. There was a limit to how much power it could generate, but it was useful for small jobs around the house where a full hammer may not be the best option. 

Even if you do find one on sale somewhere like eBay, we wouldn't recommend getting it due to the aforementioned battery availability. However, it would be pretty sweet if Ryobi brought this back with support for its latest batteries.

The Ryobi 18V One+ Hybrid Surface Dryer is a glorified floor fan. Its sole purpose is to blow air at the ground to help it dry faster. It's not as big as it looks in photos, standing only a couple of feet off the ground. It featured a built-in caution sign, a strap system so you could attach a larger and more noticeable caution sign, and it would get 18 hours of use out of one 9Ah battery. At low power, it could push 200 CFM of air and 300 CFM of air in high mode. 

As someone with a garage door that lets in some water when the rain and wind are heavy enough and pointing in the correct direction, I would buy one of these tomorrow if they came back. It would also be useful to help dry other areas like the back of trucks and cargo vans, restaurant kitchens, and home kitchens that one time when the dishwasher fails. Restaurant and commercial use were likely the intent when Ryobi made this thing given its very specific use case. Most other people would likely buy a box fan or something similar for home use. 

If you managed to snag one of these before it was discontinued, Ryobi does still sell the 18V batteries used to power them, so at least yours will work well into the future assuming you can maintain it. 

If you've ever thought to yourself that you might like a battery-powered miter saw, then Ryobi at one point had exactly the tool for you with its 18V One+ Brushless Dual Bevel Sliding Miter Saw. Not only is the name a handful but the tool was genuinely useful. We found several stories online from real owners who quite liked theirs for smaller jobs that didn't require a full-sized miter saw or a ton of power. 

Of course, the big problem with it is that it's a battery-operated saw so it has its limitations. Some tougher woods may be too much for the little miter saw, and people who need a saw often likely just stepped up to Ryobi's corded version, which the company still sells. Even so, the battery powered saw promised 900 cuts with a single battery charge on a 4Ah battery, which is more than enough for casual home use. Even so, it's still around $200, and stepping up to a more powerful corded one from Ryobi only costs an extra $100, so Ryobi might have priced themselves out in this case. 

Technically speaking, this product is still available for sale at Home Depot so it hasn't been officially discontinued yet. However, Ryobi's website points to a dead link and people have found the battery powered miter saw in the clearance section. It's likely nearing the end of the road. 

This feels more like a proof of concept than an actual product, and it's also technically not a tool. However, the Ryobi One+ 18V RC Truck is still a pretty cool idea. It's basically an RC car that uses a Ryobi 18V battery as its power source. It's not a half bad little RC car either. Ryobi says that it can travel at speeds up to 20 MPH and the remote has a range of about 150 feet. It stands about 10 inches tall and is about two feet wide. 

The premise is pretty fun. You take the 18V battery out of whatever tool it was in and then put it into a car to race it up and down the street. Obviously, this would be the most fun for kids and RC enthusiasts, but it shows an extra level of fun that Ryobi took its One+ 18V battery and made an RC truck compatible with it. Imagine being able to do some work around the house and use the same battery to play with a remote car?

It's understandable that Ryobi cancelled this since it does feel like more of a promotional product than something it'd stock on store shelves all the time. With that said, it would be cool to see another run someday. 

Ryobi says that the One+ Protip Handheld Paint Sprayer is the first such sprayer of its kind. In terms of design, it looks like a drill that's been repurposed to spray paint. It's a handy little package. Simply pop in one of Ryobi's batteries and go to town. When it was available, it was for around $40 to $50 as well, so it was an economical choice that didn't break the bank. Like every other One+ tool on the list, it uses the same battery as the rest of them.

However, there is a reason this one was discontinued and that's because it didn't work too well. In many cases, people would recommend a $50 corded sprayer from someplace like Harbor Freight over the handheld sprayer from Ryobi. Some of it is a matter of preference but other handheld paint sprayers simply did it better. So, while this is a neat product, and the first of its kind, it was not the best of its kind. 

With that said, with a few improvements, such a paint sprayer would be a boon for folks who have bought into the Ryobi One+ 18V system, so it would be pretty cool to see this little guy make a comeback someday, even if it's mostly meant for smaller jobs like staining fences or painting window trim.

The Ryobi 18V One+ Fuel Gauge is a product that arguably shouldn't have been discontinued. The way it works is rather simple. You plug your 18V One+ battery into it to see how much charge it has left. Ryobi corrected this issue in its 40V batteries. Each one of those has a button on the back along with four green lights to show you how much charge it has left on its own. Having that same functionality with the 18V One+ batteries would be quite helpful.

One can only speculate why this product was discontinued. Perhaps people charged their batteries before they ran out. One thing that doesn't work in this device's favor is its name. It's not a fuel gauge, it's a battery monitor, so the name is a tad misleading. Maybe people though it was designed for mechanics. Ryobi's tagline for this is "more than five million owners of Ryobi One+ batteries no longer have to guess at their remaining charge." Not something people might expect out of a fuel gauge. 

In any case, since Ryobi still sells 18V One+ tools and batteries, a proper rename and release might actually be a good idea for this little thing. Granted, many folks may not need one, but people with a lot of batteries may need some help figuring out which one still has charge left. 

The Ryobi Link storage system is a set of various products that consumers can use to store things, including tools and other gadgets. There are an exhaustive number of products, including bins, shelves, crates, hangers, and wall-mounted storage of all types. The idea is that all these products have the necessary parts to fit together, allowing for one cohesive storage solution. With a product library so large, it's no surprise that some of them aren't popular and are being discontinued. 

We don't believe the Link system is going away entirely, but Ryobi seems intent on cycling products in and out. We were able to find various products from the Link lineup on clearance from as far back as 2022, so it's clear that consumers prefer some of the storage products over others. Some of them seemed highly useful, at least at the time. Storage in a garage or workshop space can be tricky, and although most people opt for a piecemeal solution over the span of years or even decades, the idea of having a cohesive unit is kind of neat. 

Fortunately, there are still many products available, with some of them being new for 2024. So, much like the rest of its product lineups, it seems Ryobi is content with cycling things in and out while the company figures out what works with consumers.