Best Way to Store an Extension Cord

Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com. If you're like many people, dealing with these guys, extension cords, can be a real problem. A common way that people wind these up is to take one of the ends, grab onto it, and then start to coil it around their arm like this, catching it in the cradle of the thumb and the forefinger around the elbow and winding it around like this. Now, there's a couple problems with this approach. Number one, every time you wind it, you're introducing twist in the line because you have to roll it around to get it back to itself. Some of the loops are bigger, some are smaller. You plug this thing together and you go, hey, good, it's stored. I need to get a loop on it somehow. But you can see, look at the irregularity of this thing. It's all kind of twisted. Some of the loops are larger, some are smaller. And worse yet, the most problematic thing here is you go to use the cord and you toss it out like this, and that's what happens. But I'll tell you what, there's a better way. All right, if your cord looks like this and you've got a mess like this, here's the way to solve that and to make it so every time you've got in your toolbox, your truck box, stowed in a box or stowed away in the drawer or whatever, you can pull it out and it'll always come uncoiled without snags, without a lot of twists in it. The first thing you've got to do is work through the cord. Just start at the beginning and get all the curls out of it. See there? See how many twists are in this? And look it, I didn't fake that out. That's just the normal way. As soon as you roll something around, a fixed object, you're going to get twists in it. We've got all the twists out of the line at this point. All we're going to do now is go back, find the male end, find the female end, plug them in. So there's your starting. You're going to grab both of these here and work through just like this. Just work right through until you have the halfway point. Now here's the cool thing about this method of winding cords. First of all, right off, this is a 50 foot length, and I believe this is a 25 footer. Right away, all I've done, just by this one step, I've cut down one half of the length of this to a 12 and a half foot. When I get to this stage, that's the halfway point of the cord right there, watch this next maneuver. All I'm going to do is switch this hand over and I'm going to go just like that. You see the other cords right in there? I'm going to reach through and grab that. So this is what I get. See how it's corded around there? There's that looped in here. Now, I'm going to grab that handle on the top, right here, down below, and I'm going to push one through, switch grip, grab the top. You see my chain starting to form? That's going to be the magical part of this stowage method. Here's my handle again. I reach down below, grab more, push it up to my waiting hand, lift again, and I'm going to speed it up. Here we go. All right. There we go. Do you see the little chain right here? Now, I've taken a cord that was 25 foot long. I've put it in this length. Here's the great thing about it. It doesn't matter if I throw it on the floor and I twist it up. It's always going to come back to this form. I can wad it up, cram it into a shelf, throw it on the floor. I don't care. I can always pick it up and it's going to be that basic shape again. You always start with plugging this together, then working down to the halfway point, starting your chain from that end, and then leaving this end sticking out. What's the reason for that? That's because this end can be undone partially and you can use just as much of the extension cord as you need. For instance, let's suppose you've got 25 foot of cord here, but you only have a reach of 11 foot. Well, you don't have to unwind the whole thing and then spread it all out, tuck away some of it. You can just use part of it. The way you do that is just to back off the front, the top loop. You see that loop right there with that final end sticking through? You just undo the first chain and look at it. It starts to unwind as much as you need. Let's suppose that's your need right there. Then you're going to throw it on the floor. One half goes off to your power supply, one half goes off over to your power need, and you're ready. When you're done, you simply plug it back together, pick up your loop again, and rebuild the loop, just like that. Now, another really cool thing about this, I want you to watch this. When you take out a whole cord like this, and I've taken out my toolbox and I've done this, look at this. Do you see how beautifully it lays? It's flat, hardly any twisted at all, just a couple twists, and the cord is ready to use. Next time you're thinking about stowing a cord, it's easier on the cord, it's easy on you. Remember, this is the superior way to use a cord. Until the next time, I'm Dirt Farmer Jay from DirtFarmerJay.com. If this is helpful to you, like it, pass it on to somebody else who can make use of it, and if you this has been a quick tip, this has been a quick tip from Jay, oh for crying out loud, this has been a quick tip from Dirt Farmer Jay at DirtFarmerJay.com. If this was helpful to you, pass it on to someone else that can make use of it, or comment on our site. Better yet, like the video and subscribe. Until the next time, this is Dirt Farmer Jay.