Read our Inexpensive ways to tidy up your charger clutter and organize cable chaos.
In the supposed Age of Wireless our desks, TVs, living rooms and
whole houses remain a viper’s nest of trailing, tangled, tense cables.
Nowhere are these wires more massed than where you heap your device
chargers for phone, tablet, camera, power banks, and even other chargers. There’s probably a knotty pair of old earbuds in there, too.
In our house this is a drawer in the kitchen (pictured above) once
reserved for handy items such as corkscrews (yes, things to take out
actual real corks) and foil cutters, non-standard cutlery and cocktail
sticks. What days they were.
Now when said drawer is opened it’s like the scene in Raiders of the
Lost Arc when Indy is thrown down into the Well Of Souls, writhing with
snakes. Fighting through the knotty cables to the corkscrew requires a
rolled up sleeve and several minutes of fighting through Lightning,
Micro USB, Mini USB, 30-pin, and proprietary charging cables. Sometimes I
even come across a FireWire 400 cable, which is then hastily pushed to
the back of the drawer again.
Manufacturers hardly help. Fitbit,
for example, has a different charging cable for each and every one of
its six activity trackers. And all of them are non-standard and
proprietary.
Apple is consolidating on Lightning but owners of older iPhones or
iPads still have to fish out a 30-pin charger every now and again.
Mercifully many non-Apple products rely on the universal Micro USB
cable, which means you can charge most devices with just a couple of
these tucked away neatly.
So how do you tame this pit of charger cables?
Less cables, less clutter
First, reduce the numbers. Throw out any chargers or cables no longer
attributed to anything useful in the house. That BlackBerry charger,
for instance.
Then ask yourself if you really need seven Micro USB cables? Two
Lightning should be enough for most iPhone houses… and one 30-pin for
the old iPad. Consign the others to landfill, or that bag of cables in
the eaves of the loft that you dig through every five years when a
neighbour pops round wondering if you have a power brick that would fit
his old Sky DigiBox.
Now invest in some charger cables that feature more than one charging end. This could halve the number of cables to tame.
I bought some great ones from Amazon about a year ago but – damn it –
can’t find them on sale there any more. They were nice and short (about 6
inches long), braided, and featured 3-in-1 Micro USB, Lightning and
Apple 30-pin connectors – all in one neat (and colourful) package. Shame
they’ve disappeared but I guess the 30-pin is becoming a bit of a
legacy connector except for older iPads. Others remain on eBay and
Amazon but check the user reviews as some are simply too cheap to be
true.
Tylt has a neat charger cable called the Tylt Syncable-Duo,
a 2-in-1 cable solution for charging and syncing data to smartphones
and tablets. It’s equipped with both micro-USB and Apple Lightning
connectors – great for Android Micro USB and Apple Lightning devices.
Micro USB is on almost everything not made by Apple: battery cases,
power banks, cameras, etc, so this is a great choice if you have at
least one Apple device.
The tangle-free Syncable-Duo is available in four colours (black,
blue, green and red) and lengths from 1 foot to 1 metre. They cost US$25
and will soon be available in the UK for £19.99.
For most purposes a short cable is fine and will reduce clutter. Even
1ft is too unweildy for me. As long as it reaches from the wall socket
to the surface I’m happy. You can find 4-inch and 6-inch Micro USB and
Lightning cables on Amazon.
Another neat way to kill cables is to move to Bluetooth headphones
and Bluetooth speakers, and free up desk space with a wireless keyboard
and mouse.
Lose the plugs, too
Unless you’re charging straight from a computer you’ll need a plug adaptor for all those cables.
You can but a plug with more than one USB port. The £7 Foxnovo Portable 5V/2A Dual USB Output UK-plug features two – bingo, one less plug required.
I’ve also changed one of my power socket wall plates to include not just
the two standard plug sockets but two USB slots too. I’d be wary of
buying these off eBay or even Amazon, but reputable builders merchants
such as Screwfix sell them for around £20. Read our USB wall plate review.
We're also fans of compact wall chargers such as the iClever (above), which features 6 USB ports. Read our iClever review and find it for £18.99 on Amazon.
Read our Best USB desktop chargers round up for more space-saving charger recommendations.
For £35 you can get the Olixar 6 USB USB IC Smart Charger (above), which offers faster charging than the iClever.
Pack cables away
Now you’ve cut back on the number and length of your charger cables,
you need to tame them. We tested a bunch of cheap cable tidy organisers,
and here’s our favourites.
The simple, zipped Damai Universal Cable Organiser is a case made of
waterproof nylon that will fit easily in any drawer or cupboard, or just
as simply in your backpack or suitcase when travelling.
It features ten elastic loops to hold various cables, earbuds, and
five mesh pockets for USB stick flash drives and so forth. As a bonus it
comes with three reusable Velcro fastening cable ties, and zips up into
a neat and tidy case you can slip out of sight.
The ButterFox Universal Cable Organizer is a smaller version that wraps
up small, and so makes an even better travel companion. It uses a
drawstring, rather than zip, to secure the wrap-up bag. Available from Amazon for £11.99, at the time of writing.
ButterFox also sells the equally lightweight but larger Universal
Electronics Accessories Travel Organiser, a zipped carry case with
handle that’s more suitable for bulkier items such as laptop chargers
and power bricks. It would make a good organiser for travel plug
adapters, mice, power banks and other items as well as the usual charger
cables.
You can see through the mesh side, and there are two internal net
pockets for accessories such as memory cards, USB drives, etc. Available from Amazon for £7.99, at the time of writing.
