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5 tricks for organizing messy cords and cables
We are living in a golden age of home-theater products. Just visit any major electronics store and you’ll see massive TVs for cheaper than ever, streaming boxes with more content than you can imagine and beautiful furniture for storing every piece. Suffice to say, it’s never been easier to build the home-theater setup of your dreams than it is today.
But no matter how nice your TV is or how many channels your streaming box offers, nothing can ruin your gorgeous new setup like a tangled mess of cables. Not only will it look messy and take away from the aesthetic value of your display, but tangled cables can also affect performance and cause outages, flickering or worse.
But where there’s a problem in tech, industrial solutions emerge to fill in the gaps. If you’re looking for a way to clean up your jungle of cables for good, these handy products will get your home theater looking clean without breaking the bank. Let’s untangle this problem, shall we?
1. Use cable ties to keep everything nice and neat
Depending on the systems you have in your setup, cables can vary widely in thickness, texture and weight. This means that they’ll often become a mess without you even trying to make it that way. Grouping relevant cables together is your best bet in keeping your setup clean and clutter-free.
One of the easiest ways to accomplish this is with the use of cable ties, which keeps them bound together into a single, non-tangled bundle rather than scattered and floppy. Some people resort to more low-tech solutions like twist ties, but these handy cable ties from Amazon are reusable and sturdy. There’s even an option to purchase in multiple colors so you can code your cables to your liking.
2. Use adhesive pads to keep your cables where they belong
Now that your cables are gathered, you’ll want to make sure they’re not just sinking down into whatever crevice exists behind your TV. After all, you may need to access them again if you get a new device or have a power outage.
To place your cables in a pleasing and useful way, we recommend these Ohill cable clips with adhesive pads from Amazon. These small accessories come with sticky backs that can adhere to walls or furniture, and feature gaps that allow you to nestle your cables into a secure spot.
3. Conceal your cables with a sleek raceway
Now that you have your cables in place, there’s still the issue of the visible wires slinking their way down your wall. This goes double for those of us with wall-mounted TV sets that can’t take the time to drill into the drywall.
That’s when an above-ground solution like a raceway would be an excellent option. These plastic shells house and direct cables to your tastes, and come in a sleek white coloring that camouflages the enclosure against your wall. This raceway from D-Line comes in multiple colors, including beautiful wood grain and off-white for those of us with more unique setups.
4. Keep your power supply under control
What good is managing all these cables when they just come out of the raceway in the end and become a mess of plugs?
The perfect compliment to your raceway is this cable management box from D-Line that can store the plug ends of all your cables, as well as the power supply going directly into the wall. Now, instead of an ugly nest of wires going into the wall, you have complete cleanliness in your system from top to bottom.
5. Skip the tangles altogether with new, tangle-free fabric cables
Despite our best efforts, however, there really isn’t a way to stop cables from tangling to some extent. Sure, by tying and hiding the cables away, you mitigate the mess more than usual, but don’t be surprised to open up your cable management box to find some cords wrapped around one another like spaghetti.
To get around this issue (which is caused more by physics than design flaws), engineers have developed cables from different materials that are far more resistant to tangling than ordinary plastic or rubber.
This braided fabric HDMI cable from SecurOMax is the perfect option for connecting your streaming boxes and skipping much of the mess. Rather than knot into bundles that are impossible to untie, the thick braided cords fold in on one another and are much easier to unravel. It’s a great way to save yourself the trouble right off the bat.
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Tags: accessories, Amazon, home, video
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