The BEST Way to Coil and Store Extension Cords!

by the way this is my first time using this lavalier mic which is a wireless remote mic that connects up to the camcorder how is it working hi this is David with David's tutorials and today I'm going to share with you two of the best ways I found of conquering one of the most pesky problems we all have how to store long electrical extension cords the smaller household extension cords are usually not a problem it's pretty easy to wind them up into a hank coil the cord around itself and hang it on a hook or store it in a box it's when you get those longer extension cords 25 feet 50 feet even a hundred feet long that storing them becomes a hassle either they get all tangled and there are royal pain to get untangled or they take up a huge amount of room I set my mind to solving the getting tangled problem many decades ago and I did solve it I learned that by turning your extension cord into a long daisy chain of over ham loops you could store it pretty much anywhere like in the trunk of your car and it would never get tangled then all you had to do is unhook the free end and the daisy chain would easily come undone pretty much like unraveling a sweater the problem with that was that it took up a lot of room and wherever you store it it's really a big mess of a cord pile I was watching a video by dirt farmer Jay a couple of months ago and Jay put a great new twist on this daisy chain method he doubled the cord before starting the daisy chain so he wound up with both the plugs at the same end rather than demonstrate that for you I'll just put a link to Jay's video in the description down below you should go watch his video after you watch this one he does a great job the only problem with this method was that it's still a mess to store that great big pile of court I thought about extension cord storage for many years and what I want to share with you now are the two best ways I have found to store them method number one is the cable cuff here's how I use cable cuffs I'm gonna show you right now how I coil up a cable for my leaf blower now the cable is pretty much permanently attached to the leaf blower so I don't want to use the daisy chain method what I want to do is coil it in a loop and put a cable cuff to keep it together with the leaf blower now what I found is the best way to do this is to simply start with a plug-in of the cable put it here in my hand and just wrap it around the elbow and the hair the elbow in the hand it takes about 31 wraps for this lamp the cable which I think is about 50 feet to get all the cable and then all I have to do is put the cable cuffs on it including the handle of the leaf blower and it keeps the cable and the leaf blower together here's the cable loop here's the cable cuff here's the leaf blower I put the loop right up next to the handle I put the cable cuff through the handle and the coil of cable and we have cable cuff stored electric wire with a leaf blower and it's gonna stay together until the next time I want it out I put a link to where you can buy some cable cuffs on Amazon right down below check the description method number two is an extension cord reel but not used in the normal way as I was working up the concept for this video I thought about Dirt Farmer J's video and the clever trick of doubling the extension cord so both plugs are on the same end hmm so I applied his trick to using an extension cord reel and the results were out standing if you need to get a reel like the one I'm showing here there's a link in the description down below I think it's about six or eight bucks let me show you the trick I use to make this reel infinitely more effective what I have here is a cord reel let me get this up close can you see what that says cord reel I've tried this before and I had one end of the extension cord hanging out here and then I roll fold it all up and it filled up the thing and then I had the other end of the extension cord hook on the other side coming up one of these little holes here and it was a little bit awkward because getting the end of the extension cord that was in the middle to come out and plug into the wall was a bit awkward but I've thought of a better way to fix that this particular reel if you can see the slide is very close to the reel itself so if I put some sort of screw through this reel into the center it would hook up on this slide so I can't really have anything coming through the plastic into the center that would restrict the slide so what I'm gonna have to do is put a hook on the inside on which I can hook that extension cord is laying in the driveway and not go through the center there I'm going to have to glue it and then I can take this reel grab the knob and roll up the cord so that it will be on the reel very cleanly neatly and easily the first thing I'm gonna need to do is make the hook to glue on the inside of the rail making the hook Hey simple thing everybody can have these although they're not as common as they used to be if you would get coat hanger wire just about anywhere this is good let's work on this the shape is not that important it's just we're trying to get some more surface area to attach to the reel now let's check the curve against the curve of the reel ah yes it needs a lot more bending now we have some curve let's check that that's a lot better that is a lot better there we have what looks like a pretty nice hook we'll see one more time if the bend is the same as the bend and the reel that lays pretty flat on the reel itself so let's see what we can do about fastening it now I could use duct tape that would probably work pretty well but I'm thinking hot glue would work even better I've got my hot glue gun out here's the hook now I'm going to have to make sure which way the hook is oriented inside the reel we wanted to go this way or this way to do that I'm going to have to hold the reel in the hand that I usually hold it in with the knob there and I'll be turning it this way which means the hook should be pulling this way first a couple of spots of glue just to hold it in place and now all of the glue I don't know if you can tell I'm being very generous with this glue I don't want it to come off okay it's cool for a few seconds and I'm kind of pulling on it and it seems like it's gonna work okay the only way to tell for sure let's go outside and try it okay here we are at the end of my driveway we can see we have the two ends of the electric cord and I go up the driveway and as we go up the driveway you can see we have the electric cord laid out 50 feet along the driveway doubled over for a total of 100 feet here's the spool and now we're going to start winding it up here we have the hook glued into the spool of the reel here we have the loop of the cable all I have to do is get the loop of the cable and hook it around the loop of the hook put it right down in there grab the knob and start reeling keep winding up this spool and yeah you can hear the dogs barking in the background that happens in this neighborhood fortunately it doesn't go along all the time but once we get to the end of the cord we've got this beautiful two ended extension cord it's a piece of cake now to simply unroll it and use it however you want to here's the real duct cord and here's a bucket of water now water and electricity usually don't mix but I'm not using it as water I'm using it for weight because the theory behind this real is you unroll enough of it to plug in the wall but then you pull out the rest letting the real unreal behind you and we don't want to pull the plug out of the wall therefore a bucket of water for the weight here's that I've also got that bucket of water braced against the wall in case pulling on the cord pulls the bucket a little bit it won't fall over we don't want water and electricity they don't mix and to use the cord of course we need some sort of electrical appliance it could be a leaf blower it could be a power washer it could be this this is really cool you're gonna love this see this this is an electric hedge trimmer I bought this more than 40 years ago at a local hardware store it cost me $9.95 and you know what it still works great ken are you a success and now the moment of truth I'm gonna pull on that reel and we'll see if it unreal is the way I expect it will here we go [Applause] [Applause] there you have it it's unrolling just exactly as I said it would just got to be very careful not to let the cord get tangled amongst itself as you're rolling it up when you're done all you have to do is reel it back up so all in all this is a qualified success it's easy to reel up it's easy to pull out it's easier reel back up it does not usually tangle itself and it's easy to hang on a hook and store in your utility room well it looks to me like that worked better than I ever expected I'm going to be using that again in the future so how about it you think this trick will help you store your extension cords more efficiently be sure to give us a great big old thumbs up and leave a comment down in the comments area on the YouTube channel to let YouTube know that you think this video was helpful and don't forget to click that subscribe button and click the bell icon to be notified whenever we post a great new tutorial here on david's tutorials [Music]

Channel: David's Tutorials

Views: 113,249

Keywords: Best way to store an extension cord, Extension Cord, Store an Extension Cord, David's Tutorials, Leaf Blower, Hedge Trimmer, Pressure Washer, Cable Cuffs, Extension Cord Reel, Home Improvement

Id: ae3yuphuTEk

Length: 12min 40sec (760 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 20 2018