Your charging cable is like the blood bank of your mobile device.
Did you know that from the outside many cables all look the same but on the inside, the construction is different and many cables have a slow only design. It all comes down to the wires ability to carry a fast speed. The white and green are for data. The red and black are 5v and carry the power of charging, these determine charge speed.
Now, enough of the physics! Let’s talk about how this affects you.
It’s almost as if these cables are made to be broken, so we have to keep buying new ones!
Luckily Ibiene put together six totally simple ways to keep your phone charger from breaking.
Be careful how you coil it as knots might destroy the delicate wires in the cable:
Just dumping the cable in your bag is likely to end up in a tangled mess, but tightly wrapping it around your hand and tying it in a knot isn’t good for it either.
The delicate wires inside the cable get bent and crushed every time you do this, which ultimately leads to them separating and the cable working intermittently or not at all. A better approach is to gently loop the cable on top of itself three or four times, then tuck each end into the loop. The cable is still easy to transport, but there’s little change of it getting snagged or damaged in transit.
Be careful of bends too! Pressure and tension is not good for the cable:
One of the most common causes of cable breakage is due to it being squashed and heavily bent by tension or pressure. The point where the plug connector meets the cable is the most likely place for it to fray.
Pay attention and make sure you do not apply to much tension and pressure to the charger. A little care goes a long way – by making sure, the cable has some slack, and isn’t bending it way too much.
Pay attention to how you connect and remove the cable:
Very much like bending the cable, connecting and yanking on the cable, rather than gently pulling, can be another excellent way to damage it.
Use a spring from a pen to keep the cable intact:
Open up a pen to get the spring inside (remember those Pilot mechanical pencils?). Next, just stretch out the spring and attach one end of it to the charger cable. Then, roll the spring onto the cable and slide it to the top, closest to the edge of the cable for optimum protection!
Still have some of that embroidery thread laying at home? Use them to reinforce the cable:
You want something fancy, get some embroidery floss, cut the floss so it’s four times longer than your charger cable. Tie the floss to the end of the cable, and braid a bracelet around the cable to make for some pretty reinforcements.
If you don’t mind spending some extra cash, a reinforced charge cable would do the trick:
Anodized aluminum heads for the connectors won’t crush or break if accidentally stepped on, while a metal spring where the actual wire connects to the head reinforces the weakest link in that chain. On top of that, the entire flexible cable is covered with a woven plastic exoskeleton that should keep it safe if and when an office chair rolls over it, and prevent it from ever getting tangled up.
If you’ve never broken your phone charger, then you’re a unicorn. For the rest of us, this all-too-familiar tragedy puts us in a fix especially when we need our phones the most. These tips can save us future stress?
How else do you save your chords from breaking? Please share with us in the comment section.
