12 Ryobi Tools Beginners Should Steer Clear Of

For most of human history, our best tools were made of slightly modified stone. Other tools were made of wood and bone or some combination of those simple materials. It's only in the last 5,000 years or so that humans started messing around with metals, and the rest was quite literally history.

These days, large tool manufacturers like Ryobi have a wide range of products, serving everyone from fresh-faced beginners to wizened veterans. Look deep enough, and you'll find complex and high-level tools intended for professional or specialized work. We've come a long way from those early stone tools, but some of the products on hardware store shelves are too advanced for the average person.

If it's your first day on the proverbial ski slopes, you probably want to spend a little time on the bunny hill before you take on a black diamond run. Likewise, while these 12 tools are objectively cool, most tool enthusiasts can confidently pass them by in favor of simpler and more accessible options.

If you have a yard (no need to brag), you probably find yourself out there once a week or so during the summer to cut the grass. A little yard work can be a calming way to spend a few hours, but it can also be a headache; they don't call it a chore for nothing.

You might be tempted to upgrade your ordinary mower for something beefier. Ryobi's ZR3 80V HP zero-turn riding mower certainly fits the bill. It can mow up to 2 acres using two of Ryobi's 80V 14Ah batteries. And when it's time to recharge, you can plug the mower into an ordinary 120V outlet without removing the batteries. It provides power equivalent to a 25-horsepower gas engine, and it can pull up to 250 pounds of grass clippings, soil, or other gardening cargo.

A steering assist feature helps the user mow straight lines so that the grass not only gets cut, but it also looks good when you're finished. A digital display shows you the battery level, charging status, and when the blades need to be replaced. It's the sort of thing that's less useful for a residential yard than for cutting the grass at a golf course, commercial building, or massive field. For most of us, an ordinary push mower will do the job.

You've probably seen a track saw inside your favorite hardware store when you ask the nice employees to cut some plywood for you. Ryobi's 18V ONE+ 6.5-inch track saw lets you easily and accurately cut through wooden panels, but it probably offers more cutting power than a beginner needs.

You can customize your cuts by adjusting the plunge depth and the bevel angle between -1 degrees and 48 degrees. It comes with a 40-tooth carbide-tipped blade, a riving knife, a track clamp, a blade wrench, a track wrench, a 4Ah battery, an 18V ONE+ battery charger, and two 27.5-inch tracks. Out of the box, you have 55 inches of cutting runway, and you can add additional tracks to make the setup even longer.

They can be useful for cutting large wood panels, but they take up a significant amount of space, even if they aren't as robust as hardware-store versions, and they're probably overkill for most folks. For home use, a circular or table saw can probably do the lion's share of the work. The average beginner can do pretty much anything they'll need to do with a simpler, smaller, and less intimidating saw.

If you've got a clogged toilet, shower, or sink, an auger can be much more effective than drain-cleaning chemicals for clearing an obstruction. Augers push a semi-rigid wire or cable down the pipes to dislodge clogs.

Ryobi's 18V ONE+ hybrid 50-foot drain auger uses a 2Ah battery to drive a reinforced 50-foot cable. Also known as a drain snake, it's designed to manually remove clogs by breaking them up, pushing them out of the way, or pulling them up and out of the drain. Because the wire spins, it also smacks around the interior walls of your pipes, scraping away buildup. It features a variable-speed dial and can clear drains up to 3 inches wide. It also includes a battery, an 18V ONE+ battery charger, a foot bulb, a bulb tip, and more.

It's a dedicated device with a longer-than-typical wire. The average person probably doesn't need that much cable length to handle everyday clogs, and there are many more affordable hand- or power-drill-powered options.

Climate control is one of modern life's great luxuries, allowing us to avoid the frigid cold and sweltering heat of the outside world. There's a reason so many modern houses, commercial buildings, and vehicles have heating and cooling systems. Of course, it can be a little more difficult to control the climate in large spaces like warehouses and workshops, or, worse yet, the outside world. That's where a forced-air propane heater can come in handy.

Ryobi's 18V ONE+ forced-air propane heater can heat a space up to 3,125 square feet, courtesy of a propane flame and a powerful fan. A temperature control dial lets you choose your preferred output in BTUs (British Thermal Units). A BTU is the amount of energy needed to heat a pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit. This bad boy pumps out up to 125,000 of them.

The machine is powered by one of Ryobi's 18V ONE+ batteries, and the fire is fueled by an external propane tank connected by a 15-foot hose. It's an impressive heating machine, but it's overkill for most situations. If you need to warm a space, most of us can probably get away with our existing climate control systems or an ordinary space heater.

A miter saw is basically a mounted circular saw used to make crosscuts and miters in wood. A miter cut is when you cut two pieces of wood at an angle so they can be joined. It's the sort of thing you might use if you were building a picture frame.

Ryobi's 18V ONE+ 7-1/4-inch compound miter saw comes in a kit with a 24-tooth carbide-tipped blade, a blade wrench, a dust collection bag, a work clamp, a ONE+ 4Ah battery, and a battery charger. It can make up to 900 cuts on a single charge, and you can adjust the angle of your cut up to 45 degrees, so you can make square objects with 90-degree corners.

This miter saw can be a complicated and potentially dangerous tool at home, in a professional workshop, in a woodworking class, or in a maker space, but it's more advanced than most people need and certainly more than the average beginner needs. Unless you're planning on taking up woodworking as a profession or side hustle, you can probably get away with a regular circular saw, reciprocating saw, or hand saw.

There's something almost hypnotizing about watching wet concrete roll around the inside of a mixer. Cement mixers, more accurately known as concrete mixers (cement is only one ingredient in concrete, after all), can help prevent concrete from curing too quickly and, more importantly, ensure an even, consistent mix for your projects.

Ryobi's portable cement mixer is spun by a 0.5-horsepower motor and has a drum capacity of 5 cubic feet. The drum pivots up and down, so you can keep your concrete safely contained during the mixing process, then tilt the drum down when you're ready to pour.

Seeing a cement mixing truck out on the road is about as close as you can get to seeing a Transformer in real life, so we understand why you might want a tiny version all your own. As fun as it might be to have your own cement mixer, you can probably think twice before plopping down your credit card and loading up the truck. Unless you're pouring a lot of cement in the near future and plan to do it often, you can probably get away with a bucket, wheelbarrow, or other large container and a stirring stick. Getting your hands dirty is half the fun.

It can be easy to forget that wood was once a living thing. It's a material grown by nature, not produced artificially in a factory or lab. As a result, it's not always the most uniform material, and it benefits from some modification before it's really useful for woodworking.

A wood plane or planer is often one of the first steps in any project, used to reduce the thickness or level a piece of wood. It does that by shaving tiny amounts from the surface to reduce or eliminate any unevenness. Wooden materials come out the other side of a planer with a more uniform, even surface, allowing them to lie flat and be joined more easily.

Ryobi's 12.5-inch thickness planer lets you shave off 1/20 of an inch with each pass for precision work. It's also designed to reduce snipe, which occurs toward the end of each pass, when the wood is only being held down on one side. It tends to tilt, causing the planer to gouge the surface. Ryobi's planer features a four-column frame to reduce snipe and deliver more uniform results. If you're doing precision woodworking, a planer is probably a necessary investment, but the average beginner is several steps away from preparing their own materials.

Circular saws are among the most common powered saws, and a table saw ups the ante by mounting a circular blade to a work table. Ryobi's 18V ONE+ 8.25-inch table saw is battery-powered, so you can ostensibly take it on the go and work off the grid. It can operate on Ryobi's 18V ONE+ batteries, though the amount of runtime you get depends on the battery's capacity. Bigger is better in this case.

It features a steel frame, a table-mounted push stick to keep your squishy fingers away from danger, and built-in onboard storage for saw accessories. The blade spins at 4,500 RPM, and you can adjust its height and angle to suit your needs. It can make up to 240 linear feet of cuts on a single charge with a pair of 4Ah high-performance batteries. It comes in a kit with a blade guard, a 24-tooth carbide-tipped blade, a rip fence, a miter gauge, blade wrenches, two 18V ONE+ 4Ah batteries, and a battery charger. It's not that table saws aren't useful; they are often the center of a wood shop, but they are more at home in professional or at least experienced spaces than in a beginner's tool shed.

If you're serious about moving snow quickly and efficiently, this might be the next best thing to a plow. Ryobi's 40V 24-inch two-stage snow blower uses an array of four 40V 6Ah batteries to toss snow nearly 5 feet away. It can run for about 45 minutes on a charge and clear an area equivalent to about 31 parking spaces.

It can clear a path 2 feet wide and up to 21 inches deep, while a directional chute lets you point the snow away in a 180-degree arc. The snow blower comes in a kit with four 40V 6Ah batteries and a 40V dual-port charger. The 6Ah batteries recharge in about an hour (two-hour total recharge time for four batteries with the dual-port charger), so if the snowy assault keeps up, you'll be recharged in time for your next defensive maneuver.

It's a large machine that requires several batteries and space to recharge them. It might make clearing the driveway less taxing, but most of us can get by with a shovel. If you do decide on a powered snow blower, Ryobi offers several that are less expensive and less overpowered than this one. Besides, if you have something this powerful, you run the risk of neighbors knocking down your door come winter.

Ryobi's 40V kinetic log splitter is a machine made for the lumberjack who's tired of splitting logs by hand. It can carve up fallen trees and logs, including those from hardwoods such as white oak, red oak, and hickory.

It's part of Ryobi's 40V HP battery platform, using a 4Ah battery to deliver 12 tons of splitting force. It can make up to 150 cuts on a single charge, creating firewood or woodworking materials with relative ease. Because it's battery-powered, it's also portable. Built-in hand grips and all-terrain wheels make it easier to transport from place to place, and it stores vertically between jobs.

It comes in a kit with a 40V 4Ah battery and charger, so you've got everything you need to chop up trees to your heart's content. That said, most of us don't have a lot of cause to cut up raw wood outside of the occasional camping trip. Unless you're storing up wood to warm your cabin over the winter (in which case you're probably not a beginner), you can probably get by with an axe or hatchet. Or just pick up a bundle of pre-cut firewood from the gas station.

Like many power tool manufacturers, Ryobi has several battery platforms (18V ONE+, 40V, 80V, and USB Lithium), but in case battery power isn't enough for your purposes, a generator lets you take even more power with you on the move.

Ryobi's 9,500W portable gas generator has a 6-gallon gas tank and can run for up to 7.5 hours at half-load. It delivers 9,500 starting watts and 8,000 running watts, powerful enough to run power tools and large appliances. It also features a range of outlets for powering a variety of devices. Because it runs on gas, there's some risk of carbon monoxide exposure. A built-in carbon monoxide sensor shuts the generator off if dangerous levels of carbon monoxide are detected.

You can track your voltage, frequency, total running hours, and service reminders using the digital display, and the whole thing is supported by a hand truck frame with 10-in flat-free wheels. Generators can be a useful addition to your collection if you regularly work off the grid, but this one is probably overkill for most users. Ryobi offers smaller, more affordable generators that are probably sufficient for most beginners.

You've probably never seen a cooler like this. Ryobi's 18V ONE+ 24Q hybrid power cooler is an electric cooler you can take on the go.

It has enough space to hold up to 40 12-ounce cans, and it's got a few extra bells and whistles like a USB-A device charging port and a built-in bottle opener. It can keep things as cold as -4 degrees Fahrenheit, so your food and drink will stay nice and frosty. Perhaps too frosty. Fortunately, you can adjust the temperature as high as 68 degrees Fahrenheit.

It can be powered indefinitely using an extension cord, an ordinary 120V power outlet, and the included 120V power adapter. You can also use it in your car with the included 12V car adapter, or any of Ryobi's 18V ONE+ batteries. Ryobi estimates a runtime of a day or more using the company's 9Ah batteries. It's undoubtedly cool (no pun intended), but you can probably handle your average road trip or day at the beach with a regular cooler and a bag of ice.