The Boring Thing That Finally Tidied the Wall Behind My Desk
There is a particular sort of nest that forms behind a desk over time. Ours took about a year to fully assemble itself: a laptop charger, a monitor, a desk lamp, a phone cable, and the long-suffering charger for a thing neither of us can identify anymore. The cords pooled on the floor in long lazy loops, because every power strip we owned came with about two metres of cable we did not want. Mickey treated the whole arrangement as a hammock.
When we are in the US for our longer stays, this gets worse, because we plug in a borrowed life on top of the one already there. So at some point I went looking for the least exciting solution imaginable, and ended up with a GE 6-outlet power strip, in a two-pack, with a cord short enough that it cannot pool anywhere. That short cord is the entire point, and I will get to why.
It is white, it is plastic, it does nothing clever. I have thought about it more than a power strip deserves, which is roughly why I am writing this.
Who Actually Needs This
Not everyone. If you want one neat strip that reaches across a room, or you are protecting expensive gear from a real surge, this is the wrong thing. But it earns its place for some setups.
- 🖥️ Anyone with a desk, TV unit, or nightstand where the outlet sits right behind the furniture and you just need to split one socket into six.
- 🧹 People who hate cable slack. The 1.5ft cord means almost nothing is left over to coil and hide.
- 🏠 Households who want a little hub in two rooms at once, since it comes as a pair.
- 🇺🇸 US homes and US readers specifically, because these are American three-prong plugs at 125 volts. I keep mine for our US stays, not the UK flat.
What It Gets You
A short cord, on purpose
The cord is about a foot and a half of heavy-duty cable in a thick PVC jacket. It is stiffer than the flimsy ones, and short enough that when you plug it in behind a desk, the strip sits more or less at the wall. Nothing loops across the floor. This is the bit that quietly fixed my problem, and also the bit that limits where you can put it, which is the trade and I will not pretend otherwise.
Six grounded outlets and a breaker
Six three-prong grounded sockets, which is the right number for a desk or a media unit without becoming a tangle of its own. There is an integrated circuit breaker with a reset switch, designed to cut power if the strip draws too much current and starts to overheat. It is reassuring in the dull, sensible way a smoke alarm is reassuring. You hope to never think about it.
Keyhole slots for mounting
The back has keyhole slots, so you can screw it to a wall, the underside of a desk, or a workbench, and stop it sliding around. I mounted one under the desk and it genuinely changed how the space feels, in that I no longer see it. The other lives behind the TV.
The safety paperwork
It is ETL-listed, which is the testing-and-certification side of things, the equivalent stamp to UL. For a cheap white box that feeds power to things you care about, I would not skip that.
💡 Yen's Note
Plan the short cord before you buy, not after. Measure the gap from your socket to where the strip will actually sit. If your outlet is low and the furniture is deep, a foot and a half disappears fast, and you will be cross with a perfectly good product for a problem that is really geometry.
The Honest Version
It sits at 4.7 stars across 1,646 ratings, which for an unglamorous bit of kit is about as solid as these things get. The repeated note in the good reviews is the obvious one: people like that the short cord keeps the floor clear, and that two of them turn up for one tidy little order.
Now the caveats, because they matter more than the praise here. This is a power strip with a circuit breaker, not a surge protector with a fat joule rating. It will trip if it overloads, but it is not the thing to stand between a lightning strike and your computer. If you want real surge protection, buy something that says so on the box. There are no USB ports, so phones and tablets still need their own plugs. And it is, finally, basic. White plastic, no app, no glowing strip of light, no indicator beyond the reset switch. It does the one job.
The short cord cuts both ways too. It is the reason the room looks better and the reason it will not reach the spot you might have wanted. Chương moved one of ours twice before accepting that the socket, not the strip, was the constraint.
I did not expect to have feelings about a power strip, and I mostly do not. But the wall behind my desk is calm now, Mickey has lost his hammock, and a boring white box did that.
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