Litheli U20 Cordless Drill Driver Review

Hi, I'm Mike with House on the Mend, and in this video we're going to be reviewing the Lifely drill and driver utilizing their very innovative U20 battery platform. It also comes with this case that is full of bits, so let's get started. Now, full disclosure, I'm neither paid nor sponsored by Lifely, but they did send me this tool for free for my independent review. But you'll see at the end of the video when I go through the pros and cons that my opinions are my own based on rigorous testing. So let's unbox it. Let's see all the bits that are included. Let's put it through some rigorous testing here in my basement construction site. So in my reviews, the Lifely brand is known for its excellent packaging, but when my wife carried this in from the FedEx driver, she said, You might want to be careful. It sounds broken. Look at this very nice orange, black, and gray container. Let's get this off here so you can see better. So what we're hearing rolling around are all these drill bits and driver bits. What a nice case here we have. It looks like a carry handle right here. And then we have two stages of this case. We have this top one with a slightly see-through orange plastic full of all kinds of bits. I wish those would stick still. This is setting off what my wife calls my tism here. I want this to be perfect, but let's leave it for now. I don't think it's interesting programming to watch me go. This is driving me nuts. But you get all kinds of bits. I see some square bits, some T bits here, the Torx bits, flat head, a bunch of different Phillips sizes. Then you get longer ones here. So all these small ones go in one of these little magnetized bits here for easy change out. And then you have these longer ones. I see wood drill bits here. They have this little center point so you can get a good setting right on the dot you want. And then these are your multi-purpose bits for metal and other things that just have your standard top bit. I do tend to like these because they can be easily sharpened. All right, we have some socket style bits. That's nice. And we have some masonry bits over here. Anything you see that's got this little head on it here where they're sticking out protruding on the sides, that is a masonry bit. Now masonry bits work best with a hammer drill. So it'll be interesting to see if there's a setting for that. Oh, and that sits upside down. Interesting. Okay, here we go. All right, we get a two amp hour battery. That's pretty much the smallest one they make. It's got three out of four bars on delivery. So here's the charging cable for that battery. More about that in a second. Very small little manual and then a manual for the battery. Let's get the tool out. All right. First thing I notice is it's gray and black rather than their standard white and black that I've come to love so much. Let's take our battery. It simply slides here where this little kind of L indent here engages on the battery release. And there we go. So you'll see I love this on this side and on this side is the attachment point for this belt loop. So if you're left-handed like me, you'll be able to take what looks like a very small torque bit and remove this belt clip and put it over to the other side or you can remove it all together. We have a one and two here. So this is the strength of the motor. So this would be like a one is like a low gear and then two is the higher gear. And I'll show you what that sounds like in a minute. Looks like we have an adjustable chuck for strength and then a metal chuck. I like to see that. So let's listen to what it sounds like at your high speed. Here's your low gear. Sounds the same. Yeah, a little faster on the high gear. Okay. Let's test our chuck strength here. Turn it down to like a five. Okay. I'm going to hold it. Yep. That works. And then we can dial it all the way to 21. And then if you go a little further, you see this drill bit here that locks it. So it does not engage that function there where it will give away like a torque wrench, but I don't see a hammer drill. So you're just going to be using a straight drill function to go through masonry. Sometimes that works. Other times you really need that hammer effect if it's stronger concrete. The badging is nice. This is like a rubberized grip area here as well as around where your actual hand goes. That's nice. It's weighty, but with the battery in, very balanced. I like that. So for, you've got an LED light right here while it's working. And this button here is your battery release and it doesn't even come out very far. All right. So let's talk about the battery. Lightly's U20 batteries are very impressive. I like that you can not only use them with the tool, but as you see here, this are the two connections for the tool itself, a negative and a positive. And then you have a USB-C port. So with this USB-C, that is how you charge the battery for one, but then you can also use it to charge your electronic devices. So just like any other kind of a portable battery charger, these are great. I hand these out when we have company over, if they need to charge things. We had my daughter's college softball team came in and I was able to break out all my Lightly batteries. They stayed the night with us in our basement and they were all able to charge their devices on these. These are great. One thing I want to bring your attention to on this information area of the battery is that it has a maximum input when it's charging of 45 Watts. So your standard little home charger, like this one, this little wall charger is 10 Watts. Some are nine, some are 11, but they're right around 10 Watts. That's going to take a lot longer to charge one of these batteries if it's fully depleted. So therefore, I recommend you get one of these 45 Watt chargers. These are available on Amazon. I leave a link to them for every Lightly tool that I review. This will charge your battery four times as fast as one of these, if not a little bit faster. So great choice. Now in light duty drills, it's not uncommon for the chuck to be a three-eighths inch opening. However, I see right here on this metal chuck that it says half inch opening. So here's a three-eighths bit. Here's a half inch bit. You can see the size difference. And sure enough, when we take this half inch bit, it does fit in there. Nice. Well, no surprise I couldn't stand that I had to put all the drill bits back into their proper place. And I don't mind these little pieces of foam that are supposed to hold in some of these bits that are not quite captive inside of the plastic. So I'm going to leave those. Nonetheless, let's close it up and we'll carry it around and see if it can hold the tools. So you can't store the drill with a battery installed on it, but they do give you room for a spare battery for a total of two. Well, this is really disappointing. If you switch over the belt clip for a left-handed user, it no longer fits down in the case and the case won't close. Why do you go through the trouble of making it ambidextrous without thinking of putting in a simple hole like this in the case? There we go. Now we'll let the plastic cool. The first task I tackled was cutting and installing a piece of 2x4 to strengthen a drywall joint. See, it's cutting out. The drill noticeably struggled when driving GRK structural screws. So to successfully drive in these structural screws, they're two and a half inch, you do have to turn it down to one. It's low gear setting. On the other side of the wall, however, the drill did an excellent job driving drywall screws. I was even able to dial in the perfect torque setting to seat the screw head below the surface. That's good. I have that at five. Then I prepped and installed a backer board with the pocket hole joinery jig. The drill bit for the jig is thick and it drives at an angle into solid wood. The Lifely drill had no problems boring the hole or seating the pan head screws. I like to install these backer boards behind double gang electrical boxes for more support when pushing in a plug. Though I prefer a well-lit work site, the drill's onboard led lamp allowed me to complete tasks in low light. So it's only been a couple days of use and the belt clip is loose. So I backed out the screw, applied blue Loctite and haven't had any other issues. Well, it's been over two weeks of use on the initial charge of the battery, so I decided to do a back-to-back stress test with these common construction screws to capture the moment the battery gives out. As usual, the drill struggled in the high gear. The led below the handle flashed when the battery was finally depleted. After a battery change and selecting one or the low gear, all the screws were successfully driven in. Even without a hammer drill setting, the drill and included masonry bit had no problem boring through this cinder block. Well, two weeks of testing time is definitely plenty for me to give you my pros and cons. First, the pros. The overall feel in the hand of the tool and the build quality are excellent. Also, the battery life was incredible. I only changed once today just because I wanted to finally see what was left in this battery. It had been sitting on two bars for like a week and a half and just wouldn't give out until I really really drove home the point. I love this metal chuck. A lot of times I've reviewed tools that have a plastic chuck and they get dented up and dinged up and things after just a little bit of use. Next, the belt clip is really well done. I think it's because the majority of the weight perhaps might be towards the bottom of the drill, but I never had this fall off of my belt even once going up and down ladders and moving around bending over to get pieces of wood and other sets of screws. Really good. And then finally, I think this whole section of the case full of bits is a great value. Now, I can't forget to mention the battery platform. Just look at the front page of their website. You'll see that they have a snow blower, snow shovel, a car fridge, leaf blower, chainsaw, a powered rolling cart and a whole bunch more once you get further into the website. Just fantastic. Now the cons, and there's really just three. First, this drill is slightly underpowered for one having a nice thick half inch metal chuck. You can definitely tell it's meant to be a light or medium duty drill. Next, I can't stress enough how frustrating it was that if you switch over the belt clip, you can no longer seat the drill inside of the provided case. That should be something Lifely takes care of in the injection molding process. And lastly, there's no place on the drill for bit storage. It'd be nice to have a little clip or a little magnetized area where if you're doing a quick bit change, since we have so many, that you could easily do that like these two drills that you see here. So if you found this video helpful, will you please give it a thumbs up? It's really helpful to the channel. Also, please consider subscribing. I work really hard to put out high quality, very concise tool review videos, and there's a lot more of those to come. I want to thank Lifely for sending me this drill and it's nice case for my independent review without any preconceived notions on what I was going to say. Now, I'm going to leave a link in the description below for this drill. Full disclosure, that'll be an Amazon affiliate link. So if you click on it and end up making any purchase, it won't cost you a thing, but I do get a small reward at the end of the month. I'm also going to put a link to Lifely's very good website. Please check that out. There are so many tools utilizing this same battery that it's really worth looking into. Until next time, thank you for watching.