Nearly every home I visit has a drawer, a bag, a box, or a pile of power adapters for unknown electronics. Power adapters usually don’t have many identifying marks on them to tell you what device they go to, and there’s no universal standards for plugs, which means some adapters work on multiple devices and others don’t. Once separated from their original device, usually the only way they will ever be returned is if you want to use the device and go searching one by one through the drawer until you find what you’re looking for.
The thing is, the bulk of what’s in the mystery adapter drawer is no longer needed. The electronics that you actually use have their adapters plugged in throughout the house. This drawer contains only power adapters for things you rarely use, or more often, things you don’t even own anymore.
There are two ways to handle this drawer. One is an easy way that lets the problem persists but will help in the long run. The other is a lot harder but will allow you to get rid of the mysterious adapter drawer permanently.
Let’s start with the easy answer: adding dates. When you know for a fact that one of the random adapters in your drawer is 10 years old, it’s a lot easier to part with it. But because you don’t know what they’re for, they all look the same, and they show little signs of age, the ones you got 6 months ago are indistinguishable from the ones you got 7 years ago.
So do your future self a favor and add dates to all of them (I usually use painter’s tape and a sharpie). Since you don’t know how old they are, you can start with today’s date, since they are at least that old. Or if you know you haven’t touched this drawer since last September, you could put that date instead. The point is that next time you come across the drawer, whether it’s one or three or six years from now, you’ll know that everything in it is at least as old as today.
The more difficult but ultimately permanent way to take care of this drawer is to gather together all of your electronics together. And I do mean ALL of them. Go through every closet, into every drawer, behind every piece of furniture, and across every shelf in the garage. You’re on a hunt for anything electronic that may have needed a power adapter at some point. You can ignore electronics that you use regularly and are currently plugged in, since you already have those adapters. You’re only looking for the lesser-used items.
Once you have all your electronics together, it’s simply a matching game. Find a device with no adapter and start plugging each one in until you get a match. You’ll likely end up with several adapters that don’t go with any device, which you can confidently send to the electronics recycler knowing that they don’t match anything in your house. With everything else, you can now store the adapter with the device itself, rather than jumbling them all together. I would even suggest you label the adapter itself with what device it goes to so that if ever it gets separated again, you’ll be able to match it up easily.
However I’d also suggest that this is the perfect time to cull some of those miscellaneous devices you found throughout your house. Consider how deep you had to search to find it, how long it’s been since you’ve used it, and how likely you are to ever need it again. With electronics specifically, the longer you hold on to it the less useful it will be to anyone else. A device that could go to Goodwill today will barely be of use to the electronics recycler five years from now. Many people feel guilt over throwing things out. The best way to avoid that guilt with electronics is to make sure your unwanted items leave your house in time to be wanted elsewhere.
Your Mission
Either put dates on every adapter in your drawer this week, or match them with all your current electronics. The first task shouldn’t take you more than 15 minutes. The second one depends a lot on the size of your home and how much you own, but even with large homes shouldn’t take more than an hour if you stay focused on looking for electronics and don’t let yourself get sidetracked with anything else.
