FitPlus PowerGrip Reacher Review: Daily Use After a Hip Replacement

The thing nobody tells you before a hip replacement is that your whole house moves to the floor. Not literally. It just feels that way. Every sock, every piece of mail, every dropped pen, every last thing you need is suddenly lower than your surgeon will let you go. I had my right hip replaced in the spring, about eighteen months ago, and for six weeks I was on hip precautions: no bending past a right angle, no crossing my legs. I am 74, I live in a one-story brick ranch outside Tupelo, Mississippi, and I am not a man who enjoys hollering for his wife to come pick up a newspaper.

So a week after I got home, I had my son Wade order the FitPlus PowerGrip T9 reacher grabber. It was the plainest piece of equipment in the whole business, plainer than the shower chair my physical therapist insisted on, and it is the only one I still touch every single day. Seventeen months later it lives beside my recliner, folded, and I would have to think hard about how I got through a morning without it. What follows is what daily use actually looks like, the good and the aggravating.

How I've Used It, Day After Day

The newspaper is the first thing every morning, and it is how I know the thing works. I spent 31 years throwing papers off a county route, so I know exactly how they land. Mine lands on the porch boards and used to slide under the bench by the door, which meant kneeling on cold brick at six in the morning. Now I open the door, drop the jaw, squeeze, and lift. No bend, no kneel, no hollering.

Dropped keys and coins come second. The T9 has a magnet on one end and it earns its keep on keys, screws, paperclips, and the little bobby pins Doris leaves on the bathroom counter. Coins are a different story. I found out the first week that a nickel does not jump to a magnet, so a coin still takes the jaw and a steady hand. Small thing, but I would rather tell you than have you find out on your own.

Laundry is the third. The dryer drum sits lower than a man with a new hip wants to kneel, so I pull socks and towels out one at a time and drop them straight in the basket. It is slower than reaching in with both hands. It is also the difference between doing my own wash and adding one more thing to the list of a 72-year-old woman who already has plenty on it.

The kitchen cabinets are the fourth. The good saucepan lives on the bottom shelf because neither one of us wants to climb for it, and the reacher gets it out without dragging the step stool over. Past that it is a hundred small things a day I stopped noticing: the remote off the floor, a sock under the bed, the mail that slides off the coffee table. The T9 stays folded beside my recliner. A tool in a drawer is a tool you do not use.

Wednesday mornings I take coffee with my old route buddies at the feed store, and that is a rollator trip, not a reacher trip. The T9 rides behind the front seat anyway, because the truck bed is where things go to get rained on and the cab is where they stay. It has come in handy more than once for a glove box latch and a gas receipt that slid under the seat.

What the PowerGrip T9 Actually Is

Stripped down, the FitPlus PowerGrip T9 is a metal bar with a steel cable through it, a grip at one end and a wide jaw at the other. Squeeze the grip, the cable pulls, the jaw closes. That is the whole machine, and there is not much on it to break. The ends are rubberized and textured, which matters more than it sounds, because bare metal on a glass or a pill bottle is a good way to launch something across the room.

It folds at a joint in the middle, which is the feature I did not expect to care about. Folded, it measures about 16.5 inches by 5 inches and weighs 9.52 ounces on the kitchen scale, roughly a full coffee mug. That slides behind the front seat of my pickup without a fight and sits in the basket beside my chair without swallowing it. If you have ever wrestled a rigid grabber into a truck cab, you know why that matters.

The wide jaw is the other thing worth explaining. It opens wide enough for a folded newspaper, a plastic bottle, or the handle of a coffee mug, and the rubber tips hold a paperback without it sliding out on the way to the table. It is not a clamp. It does not lock shut and it will not carry weight for you, which I will get to.

The first week takes some figuring. You have to learn the angle, because the jaw meets the floor flat only when you hold the bar at the right tilt, and a folded newspaper wants a different approach than a coffee cup does. It took me maybe three mornings before I stopped thinking about it. My hands are stiff in the mornings and that has not been a problem here. The squeeze is a short one and the cable does the rest of the work.

The Bending Rule, and What a Reacher Does Not Do

For six weeks after surgery my surgeon's hip precautions were simple: no bending past a right angle, no crossing my legs. That is the window where a reacher stops being a convenience and starts being the difference between following instructions and not. I did not buy a hip kit and I did not buy a sock aid. Doris helped me with my socks those six weeks, and after that I managed sitting on the edge of the bed. I will be straight with you: a reacher does not do a sock aid's job. It will not put on a sock.

What it does is keep you from breaking the rule by accident. You do not think about the bend. You think about the pen on the floor and you are halfway down before you remember, and that is the moment the T9 earns its place. I have picked up a great many things with it that I would have bent for without a second thought.

Ask your doctor or your physical therapist about fit and use before you lean on any of this. Mine was the one who told me to get the shower chair before surgery rather than after, and she was right about that the way she was right about the walker. A reacher is a tool, not a treatment, and nobody should hear otherwise from me.

Where It Struggles

It will not lift a gallon of milk and it should not try. The jaw grips by friction, and friction has a limit. A heavy jug, a sack of potting soil, a full paint can all want a hand. I learned that the easy way, on a bottle of sweet tea that swung once and went back on the shelf. Anything with real weight, put your hand on it and use the reacher for the lid.

Slippery things are the second limitation. The rubberized tips help on glass and plastic, but a wet jar straight out of dishwater is a two-hand job no matter what the package shows. And small flat things on a dark floor take patience, because you are working at arm's length with a jaw that covers what you are trying to see.

It is also no help in a narrow gap. A pill bottle that rolls under the recliner and stops against the wall is work for a flashlight and some patience, because the jaw needs room to open. If your house is like mine, with furniture sitting low to the floor, expect to slide things out rather than fish blind.

The magnet is the third. It is on one end only and it is honest about what it will hold. Keys, screws, paperclips, bobby pins, the little latch off the mailbox: yes. Coins: mostly no. The first week I stood over a nickel for a solid minute before I remembered how magnets work and felt like a fool. Now I use the jaw for coins and save the magnet for metal.

Seventeen months of mornings, and I have not knelt on that porch once.

Seventeen Months Later: What Held Up

The cable is still smooth. That is the part I expected to go, because a cable inside a bar can fray where you cannot see it and a lawnmower throttle taught me that lesson years ago. It has not. The jaw still meets square, both sides together, no gap and no twist, which is the test I use on any pair of pliers in the shop. The rubber tips are worn shiny at the contact points and still hold a paperback.

The hinge has picked up a little play. Not much, maybe a sixteenth of an inch of wiggle when you shake it, and it does not affect the grip, but it is there and I am not going to pretend otherwise. That is the tradeoff of a folding joint. A solid bar would not wiggle and would not fit behind my truck seat either.

Nothing has rusted, though mine has never spent a night outdoors. It stays by the recliner, and when it travels it goes behind the front seat rather than in the truck bed where the weather gets at it. If you leave yours on a porch through a Mississippi July, I cannot tell you how it will look in a year, because I did not do that.

I read through the reviews before Wade ordered it, and 54,230 of them average 4.5 stars, which is about as good as a nine-ounce tool needs to be. The complaints I saw were mostly people expecting it to lift something heavy or to lock shut like a clamp, and both of those are real limits rather than defects. Mine has matched that average. It is a good tool that does one job, and it does that job every day.

Who This Is For

This is for the person who has been told not to bend, or who has learned the hard way that bending is a bad trade. If you are weeks out from a hip replacement, or your hands and knees have made the floor a foreign country, a reacher is the simplest independence there is. It is for anyone living alone who does not want to wait for a visit to pick up the mail. And it is for the spouse, honestly, because the one who ends up fetching everything off the floor is usually the one who did not have the surgery.

Who Should Skip It

If you need to move weight, skip it and get a cart or ask for a hand. If your grip is weak, squeezing a handle may be harder on your hands than a bend is on your hip, and that is a conversation for your physical therapist, not for me. If you want something to stand in for a sock aid or a dressing stick, this is not it and it does not pretend to be. And if you want a tool that never develops a wobble, understand that folding means a joint, and a joint means a little play in time.