I have a few drawers scattered around the house with various "spare" cables. You know USB, ethernet, speaker cable, various interconnects etc.
The Mrs hates it.
I know for a fact, as soon as throw some away, I'll need that USB A/toslink/ethernet cable the next week. SO I do tend to hoard them a bit.
Is there a neat way of storing these bloody things so I can actually lay my hands on that 3.5mm jack to jack when I need it?
Any ideas?
Watching with interest…
Errrm I have a cardboard box, which originally housed a 27" monitor, full of cables, in my shed. Not ideal tbh. I did recently go through them all and place some in a carrier bag to take to the tip for electronics recycling - a trip which hasn't happened yet. The cables I kept, I looped up and wrapped a small cross-section of roadie inner tube around to prevent them getting into a tangled mess again. Back in the box they went.
Plastic bags with a closure strip, like the ones you put liquids in at the airport. 3.5mm in one, mini USB in one, ethernet in one etc. etc. All in a shoe box.
I use shoe boxes.
1 is mostly naff LAN cables that come with routers etc.
1 is mostly anything USB related
1 is mostly audio leads
1 is definitely SCART and composite video leads, you know, just in case.
1 ditto for VGA cables (even though I no longer own a monitor with a VGA socket, the telly does 😉 )
35l really useful box with a load of a4 ish size plastic wallets in colour coded and labelled
USB c to c
USB b to c
usb b to lightning
Micro usb
HDMI
etc. etc. etc.
I use coat hooks for the longer leads (in the shed) and ziplock bags for the small ones (coiled).
Only the frequent flyers get left in the house (coiled in one drawer) 😊
We had hundreds of leads at work and hanging on wall racks worked best.
We have a box under the stairs, but it is vastly reduced as I decided there were way to many things in there that we'd never use. If I do end up needing some obscure connection I can buy one and have it with me within 24 hours anyway.
What we do have is a rather large selection of travel adapotors.
What we do have is a rather large selection of travel adapotors.
This. Also chargers with UK or Euro plug prongs, USB A and C sockets, different charging wattage etc. it seems to be an obsession cos I just bought another….
I hang mine up so that the output end is uppermost to reduce the wear on directionality! 😀
Well the answer was completely obvious!
Following on from the 3D printer thread and my purchase of a Centauri Carbon, these will do the trick.
https://gridfinity.xyz/catalog/
There are loads more on the various 3D printing websites.
Mine are all carefully coiled and labelled and stored in the correct and specific cable storage.
Coiled up, neatly-ish - and then shoved in a box. I have cables I know I will never, ever use again but I still can't throw them away.
I have a box.
Each cable I need to store in said box gets coiled up neatly, has a velcro strip wrapped around the ends to keep it all coiled up nicely.
When I place a new cable in the box the existing cables help it to shed it's velcro, free itself of the coil so they can truly accept it as one of their own.
They are sneaky buggers though, The box looks like a neat and tidy cable store to the untrained eye. I have tried to remove a cable from the box in the past. The neat appearance is an act and what actually exists in the box is chaos in cable form.
I once managed to capture footage of what happens to cables when they think they are not being watched.
The cables on my desk started the night neat and tidy but...
Do you have a door (cupboard/shed/etc) you can stick a load of these on the back of?
I use something similar on the edge of my desk and also in the kitchen to stop the family leaving cables hanging from plugs all over the floor ready to be chewed up by hoovers/dog/cats and so on.
I use something similar on the edge of my desk
They look like a rather over-engineered solution! I got those rubber stick-on ones from AliExpress - run multiple cables up the side of my sofa.
My method of choice is simply dump the spare cables into the nearest box/drawer/cupboard to me at the point of removal so that the house ends up with a fairly evenly distributed selection of random cables. It means there isn't one terrible box of shame in the house to admire but that the chances of actually finding the cable you do want (assuming I have one) is close to zero.
Should probably start a new system.
You could get a whole load of the AliExpress cable tidies (they are a few pence) and stick them to the back of a cupboard or understairs door (I'm thinking of my house here) and plonk the cables in there, hanging in rows. I think the tidies come in different colours for coding the type of cable. I might do this 😀
Like this - I can pic grab, but not link at work
It's quite reassuring that I'm not the only one with this problem.
@andytherocketeer - At least I have ditched my scart leads!
We compromised on one (quite big) box which sits innocently on a shelf. It has no internal organisation, just a chaotic clumped labyrinth of cables. When I need ("need") something from there I close the door so no-one is traumatised by seeing and just empty the whole thing onto the floor to rummage, disentangle etc. This system works quite a lot better than it sounds like it would. The disentangling to get stuff keeps everything just about ordered enough to access stuff. And it never gets full because from time to time I'll spot something mid-rummage I am pretty sure I won't need again (like a parallel printer cable, or PS2 mouse) and spontaneously chuck it out.
I use a big plastic storage box in the cellar for uncommonly used or big cables. Each type goes in a plastic ziplock type bag except for those long enough to need a drum (50m cat5e for example).
more common cables go in smaller ziplock bags with Sharpie-written labels on the bags - micro-USB, USB-C, lightning, mini-USB, … you get the idea. Each of these bags only has a handful of cables and the bags are upright in a shoebox in an accessible drawer for when I need a cable.
Cables that are commonly used stay where they need to be.
new cables that come with things, especially cheap micro-USB cables, are assessed for utility and mostly end up in the charity box. Started doing this after I asked myself if I really needed 10s of 20cm micro-USB cables and stumpy USB-C ones.
Well started soring through.
I think I must own 10 micro USB cables for every device that uses one.
cable box. And now I am a usb-c zealot, so won’t buy anything I can’t charge with a single cable. Futureproofing. Garmin varia is the only non usb-c thing that gets charged regularly. That and the Joystick. Newer exposures are USB-c too.
There’s a straggly load of cables on the floor, along with a power strip that has a bunch of different chargers plugged in, including two GAN chargers. This is because I’ve got several low voltage lights, and various other items like my iPad, my phone, and random torches that require various flavours of USB cables to charge, my Alpkit head-torch being one example, alongside USB-C and Lightning, (iPad). That’s now pretty elderly, and needs regular charging as I’m using it all the time.
I’m not disposing of still perfectly functional devices just because their charging port is a now obsolete flavour of USB, oh, and I’ve got a battery charger for 14500, 18650 and 21700 batteries that different torches require.
I’m sure there are herds of random cables that really are obsolete and have nothing to charge any more, and have crawled into dark, dusty places to quietly expire, but I can’t be bothered to hunt them down at the moment.
i have a big travelbag type thing in the garage full of a variety of usb/ethernet/phono/extension cables, just waiting for that moment when i need one and can go 'ahaaaaa i have one of those'. i should really bin the lot as i never will.
@CountZero not wishing to sidetrack the thread but i sent you a couple of messages a week or so ago but i dont think notifications work so i guess you havent seen them.
cheers