RYOBI 18V ONE+ CORDLESS 22BAR POWER WASHER KIT

£139.99 SPECIFICATION Size: 88x37cm • Weight: 2,661g (unit, battery and lance) • Contact: uk.ryobitools.eu

The Ryobi Power Washer has a cumbersome full name, but the product itself is anything but - compact, well designed, robust, and most importantly it does a good job of cleaning your bike even when there’s no hose to tap into. It’s a proper challenger to the excellent Worx Hydroshot.

This is the Kit version of the Power Washer and as such you get a 4.0Ah battery included in the price. The base unit looks like a nail gun; it’s really big at nearly 40cm high and heavy thanks to the big battery, at over 2.5kg. You grip the Power Washer like a gun, with a lovely tactile rubbery finished handle and a trigger-activated release. The battery is housed inside a waterproof box at the bottom, which is a sensible touch.

The lance comes in two stages, the first threads into the unit, then clip the second stage directly to that. There’s a quickrelease button for that second stage, and while it’s easy to clip into you’ll need to tug to get it out. Turn the end of the nozzle and you’ll access three pressures settings, a rinse mode, a powerful strip mode concentrated to a 15° exit angle, and a Turbo setting.

Also in the box is a 6m long hose with a filter and a float on the end so it sits well in a bucket, letting you access water on the go. You can run it straight off your hose at home, or it’s possible to attach a water bottle to the unit if you like.

The Power Washer is really powerful for a mobile unit, on paper it’ll deliver 182L per hour at 22bar pressure. In practice it lives up to expectations, cutting through dirt a bit like a high powered hose, with enough grunt and water delivery to shift a decent amount of mud. Of course it’s not as aggressive as a full-on pressure washer plugged into the mains, and you do have to do some scrubbing with a brush too. I found the 15° nozzle setting the best option because it concentrated the water into the ideal size for working over a frame, with the Turbo mode unfocused and pretty useless. More helpful is the long lance because you can blast the bike’s rims without having to bend down.

That big battery is more than enough to clean multiple bikes in one go, I found it’ll run for more than 30 minutes and the lights on the battery will still be blinking green with enough in the tank for another go. In fact, it’s not the power in the battery that’ll stop you, more the rate of water, it’ll suck up a bucketful in just a few minutes and this really is the limiting factor to trail-side cleaning if you’re bringing your own water.

There are a couple of niggles, first is that it won’t quite stand up on its base when you put it down. I also want it to come with more attachments – the Detergent Bottle for example works really well, dousing your bike in foam, but you have to buy it as an add-on for a tenner more. It’s also pretty heavy and after cleaning three bikes in a row I was ready for a sit down and a cuppa. And finally I want the 6m hose slightly longer, its propensity is to coil up and shorten the effective length as you lap round your bike.

I own a proper pressure washer, the kind that can blast the chrome off your car from a mile away, but my go-to at home is now the Ryobi Power Washer. It’s just so darned easy to use. There’s no more faffing with wires and plugs and you don’t have to drag a heavy pressure washer out of your shed and set it up each time. It doesn’t necessarily require charging between washes either, and you don’t even need to fill a bucket as it plugs straight into your garden hose. The cleaning is also good enough, like a powerful hose it’s ideal for your e-bike without being reckless, and if you’re cleaning your bike at the trail side it’s the best option we’ve come across.