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9 Cable Management Ideas

If you’re anything like us, your 47 household electronic devices come with approximately 270 cables and they’re all cramping your style. Okay, we’re exaggerating—but not by much. Here’s how to better sort and organize cables.

Cable Ties

Cable ties are either short strings or loops of Velcro that you can use to either bundle multiple cables together or to tie up a cable loop. They’re inexpensive and an easy way to wrangle lots of loose cable.

Cable Sleeves

If you have a group of cables going in roughly the same direction that you want to make look neater, put them in a cable sleeve. For example, the back of your PC will have a bunch of cables going towards your monitor/desktop, or from the back of your PC to a surge protector. You can wrap the whole bundle in a cable sleeve and make the whole thing look better. Or, say you don’t like the way a bunch of hanging cables looks from your wall-mounted TV, get a cable sleeve and make it look better. They’re generally inexpensive.

Frequently Used Cable Basket

Get a single basket (or box, drawer—whatever is handy) to put all your frequently used (but not always plugged in) cables. Cables are migratory. If you’re not careful, it’s easy to have your new iPhone charging cable get lost in your kid’s backpack or leave your HDMI cable in your messenger bag after a presentation and forget about it. So keep them all in one spot.

Seldom Used Cable Box

It’s common to accumulate cables even as you retire old electronics. Put them all in one box, just in case you’ll need them again. Get rid of duplicates. You never know when you’ll need a spare phone charger.

Label Your Cable

When you have lots of cables plugged in at one spot—usually under the TV or behind your PC—it pays to label your cable. Use a label maker or masking tape and a sharpie. Knowing which power cable is powering which device will be handy when you need to make changes.

Proper Cable Coiling

Improperly wrapping your cable or worse, tying it into knots, can wreck it. Here’s how to coil cable properly.

Cable Pegboard

If you have a household with a lot of people, a lot of devices, or both, creating a cable pegboard can be a fun project. It’s a simple matter of hanging a pegboard and getting some dowels. Then you can hang your properly coiled and tied cables and see exactly what you have at any given moment.

Braided Cable

You probably know that very expensive cables aren’t really worth the price. But one thing worth paying an extra ten bucks for is a braided cable if you need said cable to move around a lot. Braided cables have a braided exterior and they’re generally more durable. For example, say you want a game controller cable that’ll move around with you. Or say you need an HDMI cable for connecting your computer to your TV and for connecting your computer to presentation devices at work. In those cases, you might want to spend extra on braided cables. However, if you were only using the said HDMI cable for connecting your TV to your game console and it won’t move, don’t bother spending extra on a braided cable.

The Major Cable Clean

If you have a real rats nest of cables, then it’s time for a major cable clean. This will involve unplugging everything, sorting it out, and getting rid of the extra cables presumably left behind when you upgraded TVs or other devices. We’ve written about how to do this here. Good luck!