The Pros And Cons Of Home Depot's Rental Program, Based On User Experience

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.

You may be familiar with The Home Depot as a place where DIYers find tools and supplies for projects around the house. While it's true that under the orange roof that adorns your neighborhood big-box home improvement store you can find practically everything needed to build houses for birds, dogs, and yourself, The Home Depot offers some services that are often unexpected.

One of those services is Home Depot's rental program that allows its customers to rent a wide range of products from tools, to large equipment, and vehicles. At The Home Depot, you can rent tools for concrete work or take care of a clogged drain with a drain cleaner. The rental department has ladders, scaffolding, outdoor power equipment, air compressors, generators, welders, and more. If you're moving across town, you might be interested in an appliance dolly, a carpet cleaner, and maybe a truck, van, or a trailer. If you need something with more power, you can also rent a mini excavator, skid steer, boom lift, or a scissor lift.

The tools and equipment available for rent from The Home Depot can save you time and money. If you ever wake up to a waterline break on a New Year's Eve morning with temperatures hovering around 30 degrees below freezing, the frozen ground will make digging with a shovel impossible and finding a plumber difficult. However, using a rented mini excavator from Home Depot, you could have running water in your house within a few hours. While the rental process works for many users, there are some pros and cons you should consider before renting.

Saving time and money is just one of the pros of renting the tools and equipment you need to complete a DIY project from The Home Depot. While doing the work yourself will require spending your time working on the project, it will usually mean that the project is finished sooner than waiting for someone else to do it. 

In addition, renting large equipment from Home Depot is less expensive than hiring a professional that will factor the use of their equipment into the cost of the project. Learningropes, a user from Canada, agrees that renting large equipment to save money makes sense, but questions the logic of renting less expensive tools for long periods instead of buying them outright.

Reader2580, a "well-known member" of the Garage Journal forums, says another pro of renting trenchers and other equipment from The Home Depot is that the rental counter is open seven days per week including holidays and closes later than most of their local rental places. When renting a truck or van from Home Depot, Oldman47, a Firewood Hoarders Club contributor, recommends having your load planned ahead of time to take advantage of Home Depot's 75-minute rental deal. Doing so is another way to save money compared to renting from other truck rental companies.

Renting a tool, a piece of large equipment, or a vehicle, such as a truck or van, that you'll have no use for once the project is finished makes sense from a storage and financial point of view. However, when it comes to renting handheld power tools from Home Depot, the advantage begins to wane the longer you keep the tool. As mentioned earlier, Learningropes questioned that scenario in their post to the Red Flag Deals forum. For example, renting an impact driver starts at $19 for a four-hour period and increase to $27 for a full day, $108 for a week, and $324 for a month.

Compared to $319.00 to purchase a Milwaukee M18 Fuel Brushless Cordless 1/4-inch Hex Impact Driver, the impact driver pictured on the rental page (although Home Depot reserves the right to issue other impact drivers). The kit includes two 5Ah batteries, the charger, the impact driver, and a handy hard case.

The Home Depot's damage waiver is another potential con. According to the Tool Rental FAQs, damage protection adds 15% to the rental price, and must be paid by credit card. Yesterday's Tractor forum user 1945A says their Home Depot added $27 for repairs to a damaged drain cleaning cable even though they purchased damage protection when renting the tool.

Renting tools, equipment, or vehicles from any rental business, even reputable ones such as Home Depot, comes with a list of pros and cons. Home Depot's rental program is unique in that it offers a variety of products for rent ranging from hand tools to moving trucks.

In order to find real-world user experiences, we turned to a number of online community forums. From there, we narrowed down the reports to find a consensus on what qualifies as a pro or con, versus a one-off experience.