I’m referring to “Wall Warts” those blocks of plastic that transform standard house current into lower voltage needed by electronic devices. Modern electronic gadgets require power. And (if you haven’t noticed) every device seems to require a slightly different type of power and slightly different type of connector. When you are setting up your office buying one item at a time, it isn’t really any problem to figure out what goes where.
However, if you have to move your office around, you are going to quickly discover that the power supplies all look pretty much the same and worse yet, some use the same connectors but supply different amounts of power. No big deal because you can just look at the power supply to see which device it goes with right? Right? Wrong. Since the power supplies are commodity items, many manufactures just buy them from someone else to power their devices. This means just because you have a Linksys router, doesn’t mean that the corresponding power supply will say Linksys. It could just list a company that you’ve never heard of. You might be able to figure it out by looking at the power output and polarity diagram on the power supply and comparing it to the diagram on the back of the device, but more and more manufacturers are leaving this information off.
I would suggest labeling your wall wart plugs so you know what they go to. It doesn’t take much time, but it will save you hours down the road if you ever move your office or have to rewire things for a different desk.
I’ve found that silver sharpies are the perfect item to do this labeling with. They show up really nicely on those usually black transformers and they don’t rub off too easily.
I got an automatic labeler at the suggestion of David Allen’s GTD, and when we moved a couple months ago, I went ahead and labeled everything plug side.
But before I had the labeler, I’d gotten tired of not knowing which USB plug was which, and used post-it flags and tape to label those, which made my life MUCH easier. =)
This is a definite. I was cleaning one day and unplugged everything. I *thought* I had everything correctly plugged in. Nope. I ended up frying my cable modem and my router because though the cords both fit, they weren’t the right ones for the right equipment.