A Few Of My Favorite Things - Part 6: Reacher Grabbers

The world we live in is designed around people with functioning legs.  Spend one day in a wheelchair, and this fact becomes painfully obvious.

I live alone, and if I need to reach something that is either too high, or too low, I have to use a reacher grabber.  I don't especially like having to rely on a fancy tool for something so simple, but I don't really have any other options.

I have an assortment of grabbers, and each is useful in its own way.

My collection

If I could have only one, it would be the Duro-Med 26-inch.  This is the one they recommended when I was in rehab.  It has decent grip strength, and it has excellent precision.  If you drop a pill under the table, this is the grabber you want.

Duro-Med 26"

I own four of these that I keep in different rooms.  In rehab, I remember them specifically saying this one was good if you want to grab a cloth to wipe something up on the floor.  I haven't tried it yet, but that's probably true.  I keep one in the bathroom to help flush the toilet since I can't get my chair close to the handle, or to pick things up if I drop them in the shower.  I keep one near my bed, and when the HO was keeping me from reaching my feet, I used it to help put pants on.

This grabber is also somewhat effective for pulling things down from high cabinet shelves in the kitchen.  My strategy for managing my kitchen space is that I keep just about everything that I use every day on the counter where I can reach it.  My kitchen is very small, and I can't afford to waste any space, so some things that I don't use daily have to go in the upper cabinets.  I have my friends put things up there when they come.  Extra food has to go up there sometimes, so when I need it, I just use a grabber to pull it down.  Most of the time that means pulling it off the front of the shelf, and either catching it, or letting it hit the counter.  I try to put durable foods up there.  Putting anything back up on a shelf is tricky at best.

The grabber I use more often for pulling things off shelves is the Unger 32-inch.  It has a longer reach than the Duro-Med so it can reach things on higher shelves, and the jaws open a lot wider so it can grab larger things.  The inside of the jaws also have a rubberized cover, so it has a chance of gripping a bottle.  The head can also turn 90 degrees which is convenient for grabbing vertical boxes.

Unger 32" and PikStik 20"

The problem with the Unger is that it does not have very good grip strength.  If it did, it would be much more useful.  Once I pull a box of cookies off the shelf, the odds that the Unger can hold it for a graceful landing are very low.  For that reason, that's about the only thing this grabber is good for, but sometimes it's the right tool for that job.

The jaws of the Unger aren't very precise, so it wouldn't be good for picking up a pill, but another issue is that it's just too long.  It's hard to appreciate until you try it, but using a grabber that is too long is very awkward.  One reason the 26" Duro-Med is so useful is that it's a very convenient length, but sometimes you want something even shorter.

The PikStick 20-inch is such a grabber.  I'd say this is my least useful grabber, and I haven't really used it much.  I bought it to use to help with putting on pants, and I think it would have been perfect for that job, but I stopped needing a grabber for that at about the same time it arrived.  Its head turns 90 degrees like the Unger, but I'm not sure if that's a useful feature for a grabber this small.  Its grip strength is also not very good.  It might be weaker than the Unger, so if I were to give up one of these grabbers, it would be this one.

A grabber that I would NOT want to give up is the Grappler 33-inch.  My aunt sent me this when I first came home from rehab, and it took me a while to appreciate its usefulness.  It's a little bit heavy which makes it a little bit clumsy to operate, but it has incredible grip strength.  It's also the longest grabber I have, so if there is something up high, and I want to have a reasonable chance of not dropping it, this is the grabber I want.

Grappler 33"

It was designed as a trash pick-up tool, and it's made almost entirely from steel so it's super strong.  The jaws also open much wider than any of the other grabbers so it will pick up things they won't.  The jaw tips have rubber booties on them so it has reasonable "gription" as Gus likes to say.  Most recently, I used it to take down my wall clock which is well out of reach so I could replace the battery.  I also was able use it to put the clock back up.  None of my other grabbers could come close to doing that.

At this point, I feel like my grabber collection is just about complete, but the Grappler is so impressive, I am considering buying the 24-inch version as well.  That would give me a smaller, lighter option for those times when heavy or large things aren't quite as high up or as far away.  After that, I think I will have a reacher grabber for every situation.