Litheli U20 Brushless Pressure Washer

Hi, I'm Mike with House on the Men and in this video we're going to be reviewing the Leifli U20 cordless pressure washer along with its very innovative U20 battery platform. So let's get started. House on the Men. Now I'm not paid nor sponsored by Leifli but they have sent me a bunch of tools over the years for my independent review free of charge. So let's unbox it, set it up, charge the battery, test it, and I'll give you my thoughts on its pros and cons. But before we get started I take the time in my videos to make chapters. So this is the intro. Next we are going to the chapter where it's unboxing, then testing, then pros and cons, then conclusion. If you would like to skip ahead to any of those you're able to do that right down below. All right here we go. All right here's everything that comes in the box. Actually it made me laugh how everything is completely disassembled. You have to put the fitting onto the wand and the draw tube up onto the soapy foam sprayer. So a little bit of work to do with assembly but let's take a look at the actual motorized unit itself. Just beautiful. The standard impressive Leifli styling. I love the white and black like a stormtrooper and then the orange banding around it. There's some like carbon fiber type markings here that's really cool. So since this one's working with water, look at this. I've never seen this before. The battery goes into this waterproof port here. You have a magnet here like a rare earth style magnet and then I don't feel a rubber gasket but there is a groove that this spring-loaded cover goes into. So that is cool. We have a high low setting here so maybe instead of trying to pressure wash something dirty like a car you could go into low pressure and just lightly spray or mist your plants. Something like that I could see. There is a pretty robust looking fitting here that's to receive the hose. I would make sure all these rubber fittings so this one here this one here and this these two on the wand I would lubricate all of those with pure silicone grease. It's the same thing the plumbers use when they're replacing o-rings on your faucets and things. So it's good. It's not petroleum-based so it won't break down the rubber. But here's our hose and this is the quick fitting. Now attaching the hose is really easy. All you do is push it into place and it automatically clicks and locks. The only thing this ring is for on the quick release is to actually pull back and release it. If we look to the other side of the hose we can see that it is pre-fitted with a filter. This is just a metal screen filter to keep out any debris from whatever your water source is. So you don't necessarily have to have a pure clean water in a bucket, though that's most successful. You can drop this in a swimming pool and clean your pool deck. Anywhere you put it it's got some screening material to keep out some of the larger bits from getting up into the motor and ruining it. And this is the first time I've ever seen this. They're calling this a floater. So it's adjustable. It's basically like a little foam ball and you can pull this out and it will float. But the line leading to the filter can go all the way to the bottom. So we'll see how that how good that works. You just always want to keep the filter submerged and that's what they're trying to accomplish with that. The hose is kind of in between what I would call supple or really bad. So I've reviewed some before that had just a beautiful hose and then I have reviewed some that the hose will not unravel. This one I did a really quick test. We'll do one later where you can see it. You get a really large bag. It's like a net bag that we used to carry our soccer balls in as kids. And it looks like it's supposed to carry everything. It's long enough to carry all of it. So that's cool. I would probably just keep all the parts in there and maybe put this, hang it from here. But we'll see because this is kind of heavy. All right, this is to spray your soap. This little unit here will make it very foamy. That soap goes nice and far. Look at that. So after you first rinse off the item that you're going to wash, you can then put some spray soap on there. These are really nice. All you do with this little clear plastic hose is put it on this barb here and it's got a little cut on it. I like that. That way it doesn't get inside the receptacle here and suck against the side and not letting me out. It's got that cut there to make sure that it doesn't stop the flow. What's really cool is it comes with its own bottle of high foam wash fluid. So 17 fluid ounces. That's pretty neat. I've never had another pressure washer come with its own wash fluid. So this can fit right inside the wand here. You turn it 90 degrees, push it in and turn it and it engages into a bracket based off of this little spot right here. So in lock. Easy. This is your soaper and it comes off maybe for cleaning. Next we have the wand. So it goes into the unit in the same manner and then you've got, what is this, about two feet or so, almost 20 inches of wand. There is a threaded end here with another rubber o-ring. So I'm not going to permanently attach that yet because I want to lubricate all these. But this will thread on and you have a quick release right here. Very standard quick release used in pressure washers and also air fittings like on your air compressor. And then you pull that back to expose the little balls in there so they can move out of the way you put in your nozzle and you release it. It comes with this one nozzle. All right, let's check the nozzle settings. First is zero. Very tight stream. Next, 15. Super tight, like just like that. 25 will be a little wider and 40. Yeah, very broad flat stream. Finally, we'll switch to shower mode. See that? All of them super easy to read. There is a notch in the nozzle and it's captive at that point. So you are able to shift it with one hand. And to release it, we simply pull back on that fitting again and it comes right on out. The unit comes with one four amp hour battery, which is great. That is their largest battery that makes to date. And that will be very nice. It comes from the factory with three out of four bars of charging. I love that it has a battery life indicator. Another thing to take a look at is right here. You can see in this closeup picture, this battery is capable of accepting a 45 watt charge. Now, what does that mean? Well, your standard household charger, one of these little guys is about 10 watts, but you can buy a 45 watt charger like this one off of Amazon. I've had this one for a few years now. It works great. I'll leave a link to it. It comes with a nice robust cord and you plug this into the wall. And on the back here, you have a standard USB, USB-C, and then a positive and negative here. The positive and negative go into the actual tool. This standard USB can be used with the included cord or any other cord to charge electronic devices. And you have the C over here that can also be used to charge electronic devices or to charge the battery. Now, the cord they supply is really nice. It has a USB-C on one side, and then it has the standard USB, or watch this. You can pull that away. It's captive and you have USB-C to C. Really nice addition. It's braided. I love it. Now, to load the battery, we simply pull down the spring loaded door here. That's protecting the battery from getting too wet. This little L you see on the battery is what holds it in place. And I can see the corresponding piece right there. So we want to put that towards the handle side and push it into place until you hear it click, then close the door. Let's listen to what it sounds like real quick. All right, so fairly loud. I notice here on the trigger, which is unusual, we have a physical block. So if you're wanting to set it down and not have a chance of it getting caught on something and getting all wet, there is a little physical block here that'll keep that from happening. To remove the battery, you have a release right underneath the trigger here on the unit itself. So in this case, it looks like we should pull the door first and then press that. You have a little spring inside that pops it out for you. Out it comes. Pretty neat. In fact, this is the first battery-operated pressure washer I've ever reviewed that had a protective cover for the battery. Most of them are just clicking in underneath it like any other power tool. So all the accessories fit pretty easily in the bag. I don't think there's enough room for the actual motorized unit though, or at least it would be a really tight fit. So probably better to put everything in the bag, close up the drawstring, and just keep the two together. So we're set at the zero setting, so the strongest stream, and if I stand right here at the edge of the driveway and spray off into the gravel, you can see from the edge of the concrete out to the gravel is about 10 feet. All right, next check out this highly satisfying testing montage. Yesterday the girls came back with hay and with soda. I had a two liter bottle of soda rolled onto the gravel, exploded, and sprayed all over the front of this poor truck, and it's kind of baked on. It was too hot last night for me to do anything about, so let's get the pressure washer out, wash this whole front area and the windows, and see if we can't get it off. The manual says for storage you should disconnect, completely drain the hose, disconnect the nozzle, make sure that is completely drained out, and then momentarily run the motor inside the unit itself, that way making sure it is empty. Empty this bottle too, and store everything inside where it cannot freeze. Well that is a very condensed representation of about a week's worth of testing with this unit, so I think that's more than enough to give you my pros and cons. First let's start with the pros. So as always the build quality is excellent. This is a pretty stout unit. You can feel it in your hands. If it were possible it'd be great if it could be a little bit lighter weight when you're reaching up and really trying to get to the top of a vehicle or something, but definitely not cheap quality. Next will be pressure. Now as you can see in this video it may not be enough to get a very persistent dried out piece of bird poop off of the truck, but a few days before I started testing this pressure washer, my daughter Aspen went out with her friends to a dry lake bed and they found the one and only bit of that lake bed that was still kind of wet underneath. They broke through and sunk a four-wheeler, so my wife and I went out there with this tow strap and we successfully pulled it out and saved the day. I thought that tow strap was going to be ruined because it was covered in this kind of nasty rotten smell from all the plants and fish droppings and things that are decaying underneath the crust of that lake bed, but I went through the normal steps of pressure washing first and look at it coming straight off just from that alone. Then I soaked it, scrubbed it with the brush, and after I then rinsed it with the pressure washer, it is perfectly restored and that blew my mind. Next would be the easy transitions between the wand and the soap bottle. Nice and fast, and finally the battery compartment. I think that is a very innovative idea. The only thing I will say is if you can see in this close-up picture here, Lifely U20 batteries have this natural venting to displace the heat and I noticed that these batteries got very hot inside of this compartment unlike they do with any other tool that I've tested, so that is a trade-off of having the protection. Next for the first time ever, I came up with a meh category and the first thing in that category would be the hose. This is like a medium quality hose. Now as you can see in these videos, you can straighten it out but it wants to stay coiled, but on the other hand this quick release is excellent. Next in the meh category was the battery life. The supplied 4 amp hour battery, the largest they make for these Lifely U20 batteries to my knowledge, only lasted for 10 gallons, so basically two bucketfuls of water will completely deplete the battery in my testing, so you should have a few on hand if you're really going to make a day out of cleaning. Now the cons, and there are a few. First of all, the trigger pull. It is the heaviest and stiffest trigger pull of any other Lifely tool and any other cordless pressure washer I've ever tested for no good reason, and because I was always bearing down on the trigger, as you can see in this picture, my hand is always right at the high-low switch, and therefore I was constantly switching it to low power. A lot of bugs up here, definitely some... you see that? I picked a low pressure. So I think the trigger should be lightened heavily and the pressure switch should be moved up top or gotten rid of altogether. It's unnecessary, it's kind of a gimmick, especially if you're using the shower mode. You'll be just fine on the regular high pressure setting if you're trying to water your more gentle plants. Next, the hose constantly falls out of the bucket. Oh man! So I have been telling every company I have ever reviewed one of these cordless pressure washers for that I recommend they weigh down the filter. Then it would stay down in the water better. If I were Lifely, I would get rid of this foam ball. It did nothing, and I would also get rid of the soap. We'll talk about that in a minute, and instead spend the money and the weight on weighting down the filter. Next would be the wand length. It is simply too long. Now let me explain a little further. I think they recognize that these cordless battery operated pressure washers don't have a tremendous amount of pressure going down, though this one did perform excellent at getting brake dust out of my concrete after I had washed the wheels on my daughter's truck. So I think they make the wand longer so that you can get closer to the concrete and thus be more successful when standing and washing on the ground. I understand that, but this wand right here will not fit in the bag with the nozzle attached and definitely won't fit in a bucket. So you could put everything in a bucket, snap on a lid, and then have a total self-contained unit. So what I think they ought to do instead is make the wand about half to three quarters of its size and then just make the nozzle longer. Now lastly, I really love the soap bottle. It makes great suds. It shoots really far. That soap goes nice and far. Look at that, and a little goes a long way. The con about it, however, is the supplied soap. So I think it's really cool that they supplied this bottle of high foam wash fluid. Only problem is in my testing, it was very streaky. So even after squeegeeing the glass and wiping it down, I still see a lot of areas where it doesn't look like that soap came off very well. So it's cool that they give you a bottle of soap with the pressure washer, but I don't think it's intended for cars. In fact, let's sit in here real quick. Let me see. Oh yeah, it's terrible, the windshield. So let me pull over here in the shade and get some window cleaner. It ended up creating a lot more work. If I were likely, I would save on this shipping weight and instead make the other improvements I talked about, and then just allow the user who already has a preferred car wash soap, dish soap, and I love to use Fabuloso or something sweet smelling like that when I wash my trash cans. Now with all that said, this really is a great pressure washer, especially if you have a spare battery. I highly recommend it, and it is my new favorite go-to. 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 do a lot of really hard work trying to make the best quality, most efficient tool review videos, and there's a lot more of those to come. I also have a build series going on where we are finishing the basement in the house you see behind me, and it's all really helpful to the channel. It's free, just click subscribe. I'd like to thank Likely for sending me this tool for free, but for my independent review, they didn't give me any list of requirements, things they wanted me to say. They never ask for me to send them the video ahead of time so they can review it. I deny all those requests from other companies and end up not reviewing the tool, and I'm going to leave a link to this tool in the description below. Full disclosure, that will be an Amazon affiliate link, so if you click on it and then 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 leave a link for Likely's website. They have a long list of excellent tools using the same battery platform, which I think is fantastic. Until next time, thank you for watching. Now in case I didn't talk about it, hi, hi, I'm kind of right in the middle of something. Are you, oh, are you helping? Dude, all right.