After some
adventures, the Ryobi stick vac finally arrived to complete (for now) my "green" tool collection.
Used it for a couple days now. Thoughts so far:
As expected and hoped for, it's pretty much the perfect complement for my robot vacuum - quick and easy to get all the places where the robot doesn't get to, like behind/under furniture or in some weird corners. It also has more power than the robot, so can get heavier dirt out when necessary. And much quicker and easier to use than the "proper" corded vacuum, which I might at some point get rid of - I don't see any need for it, given this and the robot, really.
The "stick" extension with the (electrically powered!) brush on the end detaches and makes it a nicely manageable hand vacuum. With the extension and brush it's quite heavy, but without them and with my small 1.5Ah batteries it's just about comfortably usable with one hand.
Runtime on the 1.5Ah batteries is... enough for me. About 10-15 minutes at "low" power, or 3-5 minutes at full power with the electric brush running as well. To use this as a primary/only vacuum, you'd want the bigger 4Ah or 5Ah packs really.
The mode switch is a bit annoying. It always turns on in "full power" mode and needs a button press to switch to "low" power. Since I mostly use "low" power, having to press two buttons instead of one to turn on gets old quickly. And one reason I much prefer "low" power is...
Noise! Holy crap this thing is loud like nothing else, it's like a goddamn fighter jet taking off in your hand. In "low" power mode it's just about okay for 3-4 minutes at a time, at full power you might actually want some hearing protection to deal with this.
Overall, pretty much what I expected - the noise was mentioned in most reviews, and since I only use it for short periods of time it's alright.
Oh, and another minor thing - it looks like it has battery charging built in. It has contacts for all 4 battery terminals like the charger does, not just the 2 for +/- like both my other tools, and it seems there are flat contacts built into the "rails" that it attaches to the wall mount with. The wall mount however is just a piece of plastic. I assume there will be a "charging" wall mount accessory available at some point. For now, I have to swap the batteries like in the other tools and charge them separately.