Ryobi's 18V Caulk Gun: What It's Good For And What Users Are Saying About It

Using a traditional, manual caulk gun can be a little bit of a pain. They can be difficult to control when applying a consistent rate, as it relies on your own ability to apply regular pressure. They can be rather tiresome if you are using them for big projects that require a lot of caulk, because you will find yourself constantly squeezing the trigger as you go. While people having been using these manual caulk guns — be it ratchet style or smooth rod — technology has gotten to the point where they don't need to make caulking such a burden as it has been in the past. Nowadays, you have the ability to get a battery-operated caulk gun that makes the caulking process a whole lot smoother.

Among this new crop of electrified caulk guns comes one from Ryobi, among the best-selling tool brands in the United States. Not only do they have a battery-powered caulk gun, but it is featured in the company's popular 18V ONE+ line, meaning that its battery can be used across over 300 different products in Ryobi's arsenal, from drills to ratchets to coolers. This ONE+ caulk gun comes with a variety of features to make your caulking process easier, much like many of Ryobi's other cordless tools for your DIY projects, and there are plenty of customer reviews out there to back up the sentiment.

A traditional caulk gun greatly relies on the person's own strength to handle things properly. For a lot of people, this is fine for when you first start using the caulk gun, but once you're deep into things, you could be dealing with hand fatigue that makes dispensing caulk — especially really thick kind — in a satisfactory way difficult for your job. With the Ryobi 18V ONE+ caulk gun, you can rely on the gun itself to provide the pressure, around 500 pounds of push force to be exact. No matter what kind of caulk you are working with, that kind of force should be able to handle it with relative ease without fatiguing the user. You just need to make sure to hold it steady, which the center balanced handle makes easier.

Another important detail about the caulk gun is that along the side you have a sliding scale of how much speed you want the caulk to be dispensed at. This is a much more difficult thing to control with a manual caulk gun, as your natural physical pressure may result in ebbs and flows of the speed with which you work. This speed adjuster allows for a more consistent stream of caulk, whether you want to zip through the job as quickly as possible or work very slowly for detail-oriented projects that have little room for error. All you have to do is push the trigger, and it will go until you want it to stop.

Fatigue doesn't just effect your ability to use a manual caulk gun in the moment, but it may also turn you off from ever doing caulking, as it can bring up a sense memory of tiring yourself out. Even if a caulking job is important and necessary, you could very well keep putting it off because of the hassle. Well, with a battery-powered caulk gun, that too becomes quite a lot easier to handle.

When you think about how long the 18V ONE+ battery would last in a tool like this, you might think you would be able to get through a few full bottles of caulk before having to recharge your battery. At its best, maybe you'd be able to get in a couple dozen bottles. This caulk gun blows those numbers out of the water, as Ryobi claims that a single charge on the ONE+ battery would be able to go through about 200 full bottles of caulk before it dies. Because a single bottle takes up so little battery power, switching that same battery between the various Ryobi ONE+ tools in your toolbox shouldn't be as worrisome a prospect if you're concerned about a battery dying on you. If this is the only ONE+ tool you have, you would have to be doing some serious caulking projects before you'd ever need to recharge that battery.

The Ryobi 18V ONE+ caulk gun has received a great deal of praise across a variety of platforms. Reviews from places like Pro Tool Reviews and Tools in Action laud the caulk gun for making the process of caulking or adhering far easier than a manual caulk gun, particularly for your average homeowner. Popular Mechanics and Best Reviews Guide both rank Ryobi's caulk gun among the best available on the market right now.

Then there are the customer reviews. These mirror quite a lot about what these publications have to say about the tool. On Ryobi's website, the caulk gun currently has an average rating of 4.7 stars from customers with over 460 people writing reviews. Many of the customer reviews praise this as a "time saver" that is a lot easier on the hands. On The Home Depot's website, the numbers are incredibly similar. There it receives an average rating of 4.5 stars from 340 customers with 87% of customers recommending the product.

Naturally, there are some detractors, too. The biggest complaint levied at the gun is that it dispenses too quickly even on the slowest setting. However, the positive responses exponentially outnumber the negative ones. If you buy into the consensus, then spending $59.97 for the Ryobi 18V caulk gun could be a very wise purchase for you. Although, if you want the battery and charger too, that will currently cost you $89, discounted from the normal $199.