10 Things You Didn't Know You Could Rent From Home Depot

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You probably think you have a good idea of what you can rent from Home Depot or other, similar rental stores: powerful drills and drivers, massive saws, semi-professional grinders — stuff that most DIYers wouldn't buy but which they all might need at some point. That's about right, but it's not the whole story. You might have also guessed that Home Depot rents vehicles like flatbed trucks and minivans, as well as even larger trucks for moving furniture. However, what about the trailers for those minivans, and the ramps for the truck, and a whole compact excavator? These are all certainly cheaper to rent than to buy, unless you run a construction company, and all available at your local Home Depot (more or less).

Before we continue with the article, we really need to point out that not every Home Depot location will have all those products available to rent. The specific vehicles might vary and might very well not be there at all, and the heavy equipment sure won't be available at everyone's nearest rental center, but the same could be true for every tool. Before you drive down to Home Depot, we suggest you check the availability of those products and schedule a pickup time online. By the way, renting large equipment at Home Depot requires a bit of extra work. As for what else you can rent there, here's what else you might not have known about.

Whether you're moving or simply transporting the equipment you just rented, Home Depot has you covered. The store's transport rental solutions range from two different models of flatbed trucks, a cargo van, and a big box truck. The smaller of the two, the Ford F250, has three seats, a cargo space of eight feet which supports a load of up to 3,000 pounds. This can be expanded with one of Home Depot's trailers, which both trucks can tow. That's not bad for something you can rent for $19.00 for the first 75 minutes. The larger flatbed truck you can rent there has similar characteristics, but the cargo is 10 feet long.

On paper, Home Depot's vans and big trucks are similar to the open-back trucks we just saw. They're all advertised to carry as much as 3,000 pounds and the cost is about the same. The difference, of course, is in what those vehicles are best at carrying. Vans are much better at protecting material from the elements, but the lack of an open surface might make oddly shaped objects harder to move.

One last note: not all those vehicles are available at every Home Depot, and not every store will have the same vehicles. As we can read on the product overview pages, "make, model, and year may vary slightly by store." There's more to know about renting Home Depot vans, so make sure to read up before deciding what to rent.

Say you rented one of Home Depot's trucks, and you'd like to be done within 75 minutes, so you can keep the price at $19.00. However, you can't fit all the materials and tools you just bought on the truck itself. You could get a bigger vehicle or rent the one you have for a whole day, but Home Depot offers another solution. You could rent a trailer and bring it along with one of the store's tow-ready vehicles. You could also use your own truck or an appropriate car. On the other hand, you cannot use those rented vehicles to tow unless you also rented a trailer at Home Depot because, according to its website, the store won't give you a trailer hitch.

There are quite a few trailers available to rent at Home Depot. Those range from the small 3-by-5-foot Lawn and Garden trailer, to the larger 5-by-8 Solid Wall trailer, and up to the massive 7-by-14 Dump Trailer. With the exception of the dump trailers, which tilt to release the transported material, every other trailer comes with a three-way split ramp gate, which makes it easier to load equipment. Ignoring the dump trailers for a moment, which are specialized equipment and therefore more expensive, the price of renting Home Depot's trailers for four hours is $21.00 for the smallest Lawn and Garden trailer, $39.00 for the Channel Frame one, and $42.00 for the larger Solid Wall trailer. Prices are about 50% higher for a whole day of renting.

Most of Home Depot's trailers come with a gate ramp, but that's not the case with the store's rentable vehicles. You might also need a ramp if you picked up one of Home Depot's trucks for the day. Thankfully, that same store will rent you one of those, too. The rentable Loading Ramps come in pairs and have a loading capacity of 1,200 pounds each. Whether you're moving or transporting some heavy equipment you just bought (or rented), those are bound to come in handy. The loading ramp is relatively cheap, at $14.00 for four hours or $20.00 per day. Another useful tool for moving equipment onto a truck or van, or to move it out once you're unloading it, is a hand truck.

Home Depot rents an appliance dolly as well, which it advertises as "ideal for transporting large appliances." It's more expensive ($30.00 a day instead of $25.00 a day), but it might be the best solution if you're moving a lot of furniture and large appliances. The main advantages seem to be the non-marking wheels, which are useful when dealing with delicate floors, and the nylon belt that keeps everything locked in place. Finally, there's the four-wheel dolly. Unlike the other two, this isn't a hand truck but a surface with 1,000 pounds of load capacity on wheels. Of course, you could get those tools at any hardware store (there's a lot of moving equipment at Harbor Freight, for one), but renting might be the best choice.

You might already have a sander of some kind, but if you need to work on a large area, your small general-use prosumer tool won't cut it. Home Depot offers some extremely powerful sanders for rental, including different floor sanders. The store's heavy-duty sander is the American Sanders EZ-8 Drum Sander, which the manufacturer sells for $6,386.00. That almost makes the rent price of $83.00 per day or $332.00 per week seem quaint. Of course, a sander this heavy and powerful would be overkill for most jobs. This tool excels at sanding and finishing wooden flooring that is in especially bad condition. Two of the other floor sanders, the Square Buff and the Floor and Deck sanders, are described as "medium duty".

The store defines the first as the ideal sander for polishing and fine finishing. It's designed for maintenance and ease of use first and foremost. According to Home Depot's instructional videos, there's no need to worry about sanding with the wood grain when using this thing. Meanwhile, the Floor and Deck is made for sanding hardwood floors and outdoors decks, which might make it more adaptable. The smallest and only light-duty floor sander from Home Depot is the American Sanders Random Orbit Floor Sander. However, "light-duty" seems like a bit of a misnomer, since the store describes it as "more aggressive than the square buff." 

If you want to rent a pressure washer, there's a decent chance that you're looking to use it on your car. Before you do that, you should make sure you know how to avoid the pressure washer mistakes that can ruin your car. Ask yourself this, as a test. Is it safe to use a pressure washer to clean an engine? If you're unsure, you'd be better off researching the topic before doing something you'll regret. With that short but important disclaimer out of the way, here are the three types of pressure washers that you can rent from Home Depot. The Electric Pressure Washer is, you guessed it, powered by electricity. At 1,400 PSI, this machine is fairly light when compared to the others. It is, however, massively more practical than a fuel pressure washer.

However, a gas-powered pressure washer like the MI-T-M 2,000 PSI is a lot more powerful than its smallest, all-electric sibling. As the name implies, the water coming out of this tool can range from 2,000 to 2,700 PSI, and it can run through as many as 2.4 gallons of liquid every minute. The even larger MI-T-M OR Karcher 3,500 PSI has a maximum pressure of 4,000 PSI at 3.5 GPM. Those two tools are quite heavy-duty, and their stated uses range from deck restoration and sanitation to other industrial jobs. The Electric Pressure Washer costs $48.00 to rent for one day, while the other two are available at $90.00 and $105.00 per day.

Yes, you can rent an excavator at Home Depot. They're technically "mini excavators", though we might be stretching the definition of "mini" with the smallest one at one ton. Other large equipment includes boom lifts and scissor lifts, forklifts, and concrete buggies. Unless you're a professional with some serious funds, it's unlikely you own a vehicle capable of transporting heavy equipment all the way from Home Depot and back. Most of this equipment would struggle to fit on Home Depot's trucks and trailers, and even if it did, safely transporting a mini excavator isn't easy.

Thankfully, Home Depot offers on-site delivery of all of its large equipment. The service starts at $150 and doesn't cover any add-ons, like fuel and damage protection, and is only a one-way delivery. It's unclear if the brand offers any support for bringing the equipment back to the store, but if it does, you're going to have to pay for it. Another one of the many types of large equipment available at Home Depot, and almost certainly the most popular among them, is the lawnmower. Rentable mowers include a small push lawnmower, one 20-inch cutting width and one 30-inch width mowers both self-propelled, and the "commercial duty" rideable Z Mower. The cheapest of those, the push lawnmower, costs $32.00 per day, while the Z Mower is a whole $215.00 per day.

How often do you insulate your home? If the answer isn't "hopefully just once", you might have worse problems than where to rent your equipment. In most cases (though not 100% of the time), insulation is supposed to last as long as the building itself. You might want to get it checked every decade or so, but reinstalling insulation shouldn't be a common occurrence. That might sound like a good reason not to do your insulation yourself, but according to many sources, it's not too hard to do so. You do however need the right tool for the job. You probably know where you can find them by now.

Home Depot has some pretty good deal on its two insulation blowers, which are dedicated to cellulose and fiberglass respectively. The deal? Buy enough bags of insulation, and they'll give you the first day of renting for free. Sure, you'll need to buy 20 packs of cellulose-fill insulation for $548.00 to get one free day of the Greenfiber Cellulose Insulation Blower, but the tool itself costs $199.00 to rent per day. The same goes for the Fiberglass Insulator Blower: $199.00 per day or $1,393.00 per week. If you're looking to insulate your own house as a way to save money, be aware that you need to make quite the investment. If this is just a DIY project, consider starting with simpler insulation work, like preparing your garage door for the winter.

Building the house of your dream is all well and good, but what about breaking stuff? For that, Home Depot will rent you a 27-pound Makita demolition hammer without asking questions. They will ask for a valid ID and a deposit, as for any other tool, and you're going to need to rent or buy the chisel accessory to get a functioning machine, but that's a small price to pay for 19 ft/lb of strength. On the other hand, whether $77.00 per day is a small price or not, that's up to you. We thought the company's smaller, corded demolition hammer was one of Makita's best tools for demolition jobs.

Of course, most of the time you don't need the biggest demolition hammer you can physically hold in your hands. However, while the 11 and 20-pound alternatives are a lot lighter and practical, they're not much cheaper, coming in at $62.00 and $72.00 a day, respectively. Other rentable demolition tools include a couple of corded rotary hammers, some of Makita's most popular power tools for DIY jobs, and various breakers. Two of those four breakers are aimed at DIYers and two others at professionals, but the difference isn't based on their size. The smallest breakers appear nearly identical, with the same amperage and impact energy, but the pro small breaker costs $122.00 a day while the consumer version costs $77.00.

For whatever reason, almost half of the commonly used power tools you can rent from Home Depot are saws. Cordless or wired, big and small, if it has a piece of metal that cuts through wood, Home Depot has it. Perhaps there are more people renting woodworking equipment because the hobby requires a large working area, and that's why Home Depot carries so many saws. Not having a whole table dedicated to the miter saw is an easy way to free up some space, after all, and at just $37.00 per day, renting seems very convenient as well.

The store's selection of saws only includes power tools, but there are a lot of those. Corded and cordless reciprocating saws, both from our favorite brand of reciprocating saws, Makita. And then jigsaws, large circular saws, all the way to the larger 10-inch Table Saw, also by Makita. Even the bulkiest saws of Home Depot's catalog are rented for very affordable prices. The table saw we just mentioned is $52.00 per day, but just about everything else is half the price or less. The 7.25-inch circular saw, for example, can be rented for less than $100 a week, a price much lower than the $152.00 of the 7-inch grinder by the same brand.

We've spent the whole article talking about all the weird, varied, and incredible things Home Depot will rent you, but we shouldn't forget about the basics. Maybe you don't do that much DIY after all, or only dabble in aspects of it, and don't have a tool for every job. However, even if you have no interest in drilling into a big slab of concrete, the time has come to do just that. Once again, Home Depot can help you. For one, the store's website has a helpful guide about drilling into concrete. More importantly, there are different kinds of hammer drills available for renting, from Makita's ½-inch corded model to Milwaukee's battery-powered options, and more.

The same goes for handheld grinders, laser levelers, and sanders that aren't as wide as the average armchair. Pretty much any tool you might need is available for rent at a fraction of its full price. More than with every other tool we've talked about, it's vital that you verify what your local Home Depot has in store. Some categories of tools on display on the brand's website don't offer much in the realm of choice, even though they cover their bases well enough. There don't seem to be any impact wrenches, for example, but that doesn't mean your local Home Depot doesn't carry them.