Ryobi Black Friday $79 combo kit review

For Black Friday 2023, Home Depot offered a Ryobi combo kit for $79. It included a drill, a saw, and a work light. They billed it as a $300 value. I bought one so you don’t necessarily have to. In this blog post, I’ll tell you whether it’s worth considering.

What do you get for $79?

The packaging proclaimed it was a $300 value. That’s an exaggeration. The box included a drill, a circular saw, a work light, a pair of 1.5 amp hour batteries, and the very most basic battery charger they could engineer.

Let’s go through each one at a time.

The drill

The drill gives a first impression of being very basic. It’s compact and lightweight, and doesn’t come with any drill bits, not even the standard dual sided Philips/ slotted bit we expect a drill to come with. There’s no holder anywhere on the drill to store a drill bit when you’re not using it. The only nicety it includes is an LED that lights up for extra light while you are actively drilling.

The motor doesn’t have much power, and the aroma it emitted the first time I used it didn’t instill a high degree of confidence. The aroma subsided, but the drill struggled at actually drilling holes in lumber.

I already have an impact driver and a regular drill that work well, but I’d like to have a third drill on standby that I can use to drive screws so I can avoid changing bits. It’s fine for that.

But the only advantage this drill has over the $29 Warrior-branded drill that Harbor Freight sells is that it uses the Ryobi battery system. This Ryobi drill is pretty gutless. It does the main thing I wanted it to do, which is drive screws when an impact driver would be overkill.

The circular saw

The circular saw is also a no frills saw. I wouldn’t even call it a full size saw, because it comes with a five and a half inch blade. The blade comes with sells for $10, and happens to be the same as the cheapest circular saw blade Home Depot sells. The blade cuts, but it is a rough cut suitable for framing.

I’ll be able to improve this saw quite a bit by buying a selection of blades to put in it. Better blades will help the saw get more from its motor and battery. It’s not as gutless as the drill, and I found I was able to make decent cuts with it as-is, with the supplied blade and battery.

The main reason I can get by with this saw is because I own other corded saws that I can use when this one isn’t suitable for the task at hand. There will be times when this saw is more convenient. I didn’t have high expectations for either the drill or the saw, but while I can say the drill fell short of expectations, the saw exceeded them. It’s not as good as Harbor Freight’s cheapest cordless circular saw, but that saw costs $50, and it uses a different battery system. I would have willingly paid $50 for this saw on its own.

The light

I wasn’t terribly interested in the light, and honestly, I probably would have bought the combo kit for the same price even if it didn’t include the light. Of the three tools, it’s the only one Home Depot normally sells on its own, and it sells for $29.

I underestimated it. I’m still not sure I would buy one on its own, but sometimes when you’re working, power and light are scarce, because you have the power off. Having a portable work light to illuminate your work helps you get the job done faster and make fewer mistakes. The light emits 280 lumens, which isn’t a lot, but since it all goes in one direction and you can rotate the light so it shines in whatever direction you want it, it’s enough to make a difference.

And when we have power outages, having at least one flashlight that uses the same battery system as our yard tools and power tools will be very nice.

I had zero expectations for this light, but I’m glad I have it. It makes up for my disappointment in the drill.

The charger

When I was unboxing the combo kit, my wife walked in while I was pulling the charger out of the box to look at it. “That’s cute,” she said. “What is it?”

“The charger,” I replied.

“That’s the charger?” she asked disbelievingly. “How’d they make it smaller than the battery?”

By making it a very basic, no-frills charger, that’s how. It clips onto the top of the battery, and it receives power from a hard wired AC adapter.

You’ll usually get a better charger if you buy a battery and charger combo pack or if you buy a single tool that includes a battery and charger. This one seems okay, but not great. And the small size makes it much easier to misplace.

The batteries

The older Ryobi p104 batteries were notorious for dying young and not exactly providing awe-inspiring power while they were alive. These batteries are a different model from those, and they at least include a push button with LED indicators you can use to see how much power they have left. If you are diligent about checking the power when the tools start feeling like they’ve lost their punch, and you put them back on the charger while they still have a bar or two of power, that will eliminate one failure point from the earlier Ryobi batteries.

If they last more than 50 charge/discharge cycles, they will be an improvement over their predecessors. But the other problem is one and a half amps isn’t really enough for a drill or a saw. The drill is terrible even with a 4-amp battery, but it’s useless to me with a 1.5-amp battery. The saw will work better and longer with a more powerful battery. I was able to make several cuts with the saw with the 1.5-amp battery, but based on what the battery level was looking like after 10 cuts in 2×4 lumber, the claim of 215 cuts on a single charge sounds really optimistic.

I’ll use the batteries, but I’ll probably use them in the light more than anything else. I’ll dive into the batteries in more depth in their own review.

Potential upgrades

There are several things you can do with this set to make it work better. The first is buying decent batteries. A 4-amp-hour battery will be a nice upgrade for the drill and the saw. The battery set costs as much as the kit, but Ryobi’s downfall has always been their pack-in batteries.

You will also be much happier with the saw if you put a better blade on it. I know putting an expensive blade on a saw from a $79 bundle seems like a weird thing to do, but you’ll be happier with the better blade, and if you do end up buying a better saw, that blade will improve your upgraded saw as well. Home Depot carries a selection of blades that sell for between $12 and $20, and any of them will make this saw perform better.

As for the drill, a 4-amp-hour battery makes it useful for driving screws, but there’s not much you can do for this. Even the cheap Ryobi drill that Home Depot puts on sale periodically for $50 is a big improvement.

Why am I reviewing a Black Friday special after Black Friday?

I’m not sure this Black Friday special lived up to Home Depot’s expectations. I noticed it in their sales flyer and thought it sounded interesting, but when 6 a.m. rolled around, I couldn’t motivate myself to get out of bed and drive 3 minutes to Home Depot and fight the crowd.

And once I finally woke up, time got away from me. It wasn’t until 4:00 p.m. that I managed to drag myself down there, and even then, it was only after checking the traffic and seeing it was less busy than usual.

I wasn’t counting on being able to get one that late but figured it was worth a shot. I had to walk all the way to the end of the Black Friday display to get one, but there it was, right at the end. And they had plenty of stock. The display was full. I’d be surprised if I was the first person to buy one at 4 p.m. It’s more likely they were restocking it. But the store near me had plenty, at any rate.

They didn’t intend to be selling these past Monday, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the store local to you still had them by the time you read this. And as long as they keep the price under $90, it’s a decent deal for what it is. Their target market is probably the first time home buyer who needs something to get by until they can afford something better. But I think it’s better for filling a couple of gaps in a Ryobi tool collection if you already have better batteries and at least one of their better drills.

Should you buy one?

So there’s no way this kit is the $300 value the sale flyer and box claim it to be. It’s a reasonable deal at $79, and if the batteries hold up, I’d go so far as to call it a good deal. I wish they’d either sell the saw separately for around $40 instead of messing with the combo kit, or include a better drill in the pack, even if it meant raising the price to $99.