I Love Ego’s New Cordless Pressure Washer. But You Shouldn’t Buy It. | Reviews by Wirecutter

By Doug Mahoney

Doug Mahoney is a writer covering home-improvement topics, outdoor power equipment, bug repellents, and (yes) bidets.

The Ego HPW3204-2 Power+ 3200 PSI Pressure Washer is overflowing with innovation, oriented toward convenience, and extremely well thought-out. We hope that a lot of its best design elements become standard-setters for all good pressure washers.

We almost can’t praise it enough. Ego’s new cordless pressure washer is, in some ways, the best pressure washer we’ve seen over nearly a decade testing them in New Hampshire.

But we don’t recommend it. The overall concept of a cordless pressure washer is flawed—there may be no power cord hampering your mobility, but you’re still tethered to a hose. (You can also use a bucket—briefly.) Plus, it’s too expensive, and its battery life is disappointingly short.

This is Ego’s first pressure washer, but the company also makes a number of tools that we recommend.

It made its name with capable cordless lawn mowers, string trimmers, and leaf blowers, and it has recently expanded its 56-volt battery platform into other things, such as misting fans, area lights, and mini bikes.

Ego’s new pressure washer joins recent releases from Greenworks and Ryobi as one of the very few cordless pressure washers available.

It made a strong impression as soon as we started testing it, offering a combination of convenience, design, and features that solve nearly all of the minor frustrations we’ve experienced over the years we’ve spent testing these tools.

Setup has never been easier. Usually, connecting a washer’s sprayer hose to the spray wand involves the tedious task of twisting on (and often cross-threading) some fairly lightweight hardware. Ego replaces that, at both ends, with quick-connect hardware—it’s a simple push, followed by a satisfying click.

The two-part spray wand also comes together with a convenient quick-connect push. Even the water-inlet connection, where the pressure washer attaches to a garden hose, is simpler to deal with than on most other models. Here, Ego offers a big, chunky collet that is easy to grip and to twist onto the hose hardware.

The pressure-control adjustment method is the first of its kind. This pressure washer has three modes, so you can moderate the amount of water and pressure to fit the task. That in itself isn’t a unique feature, and the toggle for it is situated on the body of the pressure washer, as you might expect.

What’s new is that you can also adjust the pressure at the handle of the spray wand.

Any changes you make are relayed to the washer via a Bluetooth connection, which means you can make adjustments to your washing on the fly.

So, for instance, if you’re rinsing soap off your car with a lighter spray, you can quickly bump up the pressure a notch when you get to the tires. In our tests, the response time between the button push and the shift in the spray was almost instantaneous. (A battery-charge indicator is also displayed on the handle.)

The sprayer hose sets a new standard for quality. Nearly every other pressure washer we’ve tested comes with a stiff, permanently coiled, brittle tube that’s difficult to wrangle and easy to trip over. In fact, we’ve found that people who are serious about pressure washers often replace this stock part with a higher-quality hose as the first order of business.

There’s no need for that with this Ego model. Its sprayer hose is as floppy and kink-free as a quality rubber garden hose, which significantly improves setup, use, storage, and long-term durability.

The hardware has good holsters. The holster for the spray wand actually holds the spray wand in place when you aren’t using it. That sounds like a low bar to clear, but it’s an expectation that the flimsy holders on most other pressure washers typically fail to meet. The spray nozzles, stored at the top of the body, are secure and easy to get to as well.

It’s very portable. The telescoping luggage-style handle, which tucks out of the way when not in use, is helpful for bumping this Ego pressure washer across a lawn or up a curb. The machine has a low center of gravity and is heavy enough to avoid falling over when you tug the hose a little. And, of course, you don’t have to plug this thing in.

It offers plenty of power. Many times cordless tools lack the oomph of their corded cousins, but that isn’t the case here. If anything, the Ego HPW3204-2, at its highest setting, is actually more powerful than our top corded pressure washer pick, the Ryobi RY142500. Battery life and run time certainly come into play (more on that in a second), but in actual cleaning ability during our tests, this Ego cordless model was impressive.

The cordless portability is this tool’s most significant feature. It’s also central to our struggle with the overall concept.

Going cordless is cool. But you’re still tethered to a hose (or committed to hauling buckets). One of the biggest selling points of cordless tools is that they are untethered from a power source. You can go anywhere with them.

Although Ego’s pressure washer sheds the power cord, it still must be tethered to a water source, typically a garden hose.

To go beyond the 50-foot range of the average hose, an included siphon hose can pull water from an alternate source. This usually means a bucket. And a full 5-gallon bucket, with over 40 pounds of sloshing water, is not so portable itself. To get much cleaning done, you need a lot of water: We got less than five minutes of cleaning time on the machine’s high setting while working from a full 5-gallon bucket.

The run time is good only for short bursts of cleaning. With two fully charged batteries, we got about 15 minutes of run time on the pressure washer’s highest setting. That isn’t a lot if you’re cleaning a long brick walkway. The middle power level offers about 30 minutes of run time.

The charger—the machine comes with only a single charger, by the way—takes about 80 minutes to charge a single battery. The pressure washer is capable of operating with only one battery, but the run time is cut in half, and the highest power setting is disabled.

If you have a big job that requires high pressure, such as a driveway in need of washing, you’re in for a lot of downtime while you’re waiting for the batteries to charge.

It’s expensive. The Ego HPW3204-2 debuted in early 2024 at about $800. Our corded pressure washer recommendation, the excellent Ryobi RY142500, costs about $300. Most of the HPW3204-2’s high price is likely due to the two 6.0 Ah batteries it comes with, which cost over $300 each as a standalone purchase.

The batteries can run other tools, but they’re an odd size. Ego batteries are all interchangeable, which is great. But these 6.0 Ah batteries reside in a kind of in-between area among Ego’s various tools.

The company’s mowers typically come with 7.5 Ah batteries, and its newer LM2206P mower comes with 10.0 Ah batteries. Using the 6.0 Ah size in a mower or in Ego’s snow blower might not give you the run time you expect.

Ego’s lighter-duty tools, such as its string trimmers and leaf blowers, typically come with a smaller, 2.5 Ah or 5.0 Ah battery. When we’ve used larger mower-sized batteries to test those tools, the run time has been great, but they’ve felt unnecessarily heavy and imbalanced.

The price is still high even if you already own Ego batteries. For folks who have other Ego tools and batteries on hand, the pressure washer is also sold as a battery-free bare tool (HPW3200). However, availability on that version has been limited in 2024, and its listed price of about $450 is honestly an even worse deal than buying the full set for $800.

We’re honestly not sure.

We spoke to Ego, read discussions about cordless tools among pressure washer enthusiasts, and considered our own test experiences to come up with a few scenarios where you could fully use this tool’s cordless capabilities:

There are surely other situations, but as you can see by our stretched logic, they’re all pretty specialized and peripheral cases. Usually, when you have a hose, you also have power.

We’ve found corded pressure washers to be pretty portable, anyway. The Ryobi pressure washer that we recommend comes with a 35-foot power cord, and it can take a 25-foot extension cord, surpassing the 50-foot length of an average garden hose. Add to that the 25-foot sprayer hose, and you have an 85-foot reach from an outlet.

We truly appreciate Ego’s reinvention of the pressure washer. But until we can come up with a satisfactory answer to the question of who needs it, we won’t recommend that you buy it.

This article was edited by Harry Sawyers and Ben Frumin.

Doug Mahoney

Doug Mahoney is a senior staff writer at Wirecutter covering home improvement. He spent 10 years in high-end construction as a carpenter, foreman, and supervisor. He lives in a very demanding 250-year-old farmhouse and spent four years gutting and rebuilding his previous home. He also raises sheep and has a dairy cow that he milks every morning.

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