Recommend a charging station

January 15, 2014 6:50 PM

We have a ton of devices with different chargers and I am looking for a clean charging station that will hide the cord clutter but still allow us to charge multiple devices (with varying connectors) at once. Any recommendations?

My husband and I have a million devices - 2 kindles, two new iPhones, two old iPhones (used as iPods/baby white noise device), 2 actual iPods, a blackberry, an iPad mini, and two portable iPhone battery chargers that need to be charged (but they have different chargers, argh!). Oh my god, writing that down, we appear to have serious problems!!

We currently have a charging station that looks a lot like this. It (a) is not big enough to hold the at least 5 different chargers that we have and (b) is so annoying because the chargers do not actually fit in back section or through the holes and so we have cables sticking out everywhere and it looks bad.

So - can you recommend a charging station that fits and hides a ton of chargers and their cables and also fits more than four (more likely five or six) different chargers without us having to plug/unplug different chargers every night?

posted by echo0720 to Technology (5 answers total)

I had one of these in my last place. Enook. Not inexpensive, but excellent.
posted by Lescha at 7:52 PM on January 15, 2014

If you have an unused or clearable drawer in some furniture you already have, or if you can find a nice, right sized box, you can pretty easily modify it as a charging station. Just get a power squid or something similar, cut a hole in the back of your box/drawer/whatever large enough to accommodate the plug, then attach the chargers. If it's a tallish container, you can add a little pegboard shelf, so that the power strip is underneath and the chargers stick up through some holes in the pegboard so you just set your devices on the shelf. (Put zip ties or bread bag tag things on the cords so they don't fall through.)

Here are ten different DIY charging station ideas, ranging from pure utilitarian to actually really cool looking.

I've been putting off this project myself, and had managed to put it out of my mind entirely until your question reminded me. I will probably do it tomorrow. Or the tomorrow of tomorrow. Or something like that.
posted by ernielundquist at 8:12 AM on January 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

I use a Blue Lounge box and it works well. It hides all the cables and plugs, which are what bother me. It doesn't have a place to hold the devices as they're being charged, so they end up sitting on the box and on the counter next to it, but realistically I know I would never bother to put my phone in a slot anyway.
posted by The corpse in the library at 9:09 AM on January 16, 2014

Oh, and we only have a Mini but they make other sizes and shapes. We also have a million devices, much like your list, but since they're not all charging at one time the Mini is enough. The Kindles can use the same cable as Mr Corpse's phone, the iPad and the old iPod Touches use the same cable so we have two of those, the new iPhone is a snob and won't share so it gets its own.

When we travel, if it's a road trip and space isn't a problem, we can just toss the box in the car and know we've got all the cables we need.
posted by The corpse in the library at 9:16 AM on January 16, 2014

Check thrift stores. After buying a charging station that was Naugahyde covered cardboard at Target I got tired of paying $20-$25 for crappy charging stations and I didn't want to pay a premium for something better. I managed to find two 3-bay charging stations for my multiple devices for about 3 bucks each at a local thrift store. I see at least once charging station every time I go to the thrift store. Mackelmore buys clothes, I buy charging stations. Man I'm fucking awesome.
posted by Rob Rockets at 4:18 PM on January 16, 2014