How to take care of the cables of your electronic devices so that they do not get damaged (and that is probably not how you are doing it)

Your team has subjected USB cables to unspeakable horrors: crushed, stretched, plugged in too many times… you name it. As if that were not enough, he x-rays them to study the damage.

I called Pecht with what I thought was a simple question: What’s the best way to coil a charging cable? All my life I have believed that cables should be wound in loose concentric circles – not too tight! Because over-tightening or tangling is the perfect recipe for ruining them.

It’s a very common idea among people I know, so I was hoping to hear some science to back up my wire wrapping technique. Instead, I discovered that I—and probably millions of others—have been wasting our time.

“It just doesn’t matter”says Pecht. “We’ve worked for some of the big IT companies, the ones you’re thinking of when I say that. We have never seen failures due to winding them incorrectly”.

This was so difficult to reconcile with my philosophy on cables that I contacted other experts, who told me the same thing: wind your charging cables however you want. However, there are other bad habits that have been shortening the life of my cables. Things I’ve been doing daily for decades. Poor cables! I wish I had known.

The good news is that I’m here to share what I learned so you can stop making the same mistakes I did. Our cables work hard for us, but we rarely notice until they stop working and we are left with no way to charge our devices. Don’t they deserve a little respect? If you are still not convinced, you should know that taking care of your cables is better for your pocket and also for the environment.

“There are two types of people in this world: those who destroy cables and those who don’t.“says Kyle Wiens, co-founder of iFixit, a sustainability and consumer rights company that helps repair electronic devices.”It pains me to admit it, but I think I belong to the destructive group. When a cable breaks, it is almost always because it fails to connect to the connector.”.

Ready for an anatomy lesson? Your cables are full of small metal wires covered in insulating material. At the end, they are threaded into a connector with a plug. That union is where they usually fail. It makes sense if you think about it. When you use a cable, the connector acts as an anchor, and all the bending occurs right at the end of the cable.

Imagine a paper clip. If you bend it over and over at the same point, it breaks. “At a microscopic level, bending an object beyond its elastic limit causes the bonds between atoms to break and reform as they change position.”explains Robert Hyers, head of the mechanical and materials engineering department at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in the United States.

“An accumulation of defects called dislocations occurs, where atoms do not line up, like wrinkles in a carpet“Excessive dislocations harden the metal, which then breaks, and the clip is damaged. Metal wires within a cable work the same way.

Hopefully you feel sorry for those atoms and avoid some of these common problems. “Something that many people do, including me sometimes out of laziness, is simply pull on the long part of the cable to disconnect it” says Pecht. “That creates additional tension that wouldn’t exist if you just pulled on the connector.”

A major source of problems is cables that are too short, says Hyers. If you stretch the cable to reach the plug, you are damaging it. O, if you are lying down in bed (or anywhere else) with the phone plugged in, pulling the connector into a steep angle to continue using it, you are asking for problems.

“Another thing we see people do is plug in the phone and then place it in the car cup holderso it doesn’t move“, dice wines.”Thus, the phone rests on the cable and all the pressure of the phone’s weight, including bouncing when driving, falls right on that point.“Stop doing it. It’s cruel.”

The truth is that it does matter how long, heavy cables are wound. Ask anyone who works in film or audio, and they’ll tell you about the “over and under” cable wrapping technique that professionals recommend. But Wiens and others tell me that these rules don’t apply to flimsy, flexible charging cables.

Wiens says coiling cables too tightly is not good. However, unless you bend them at a very steep angle, pull on the connector, or bend it when winding them, poor winding is very unlikely to cause problems. The problem lies in mistreatment of the connector.

Treat that part of the cable with care, “and it will last longer than me”, dice Hyers.

But that means that the cables are of good quality. Everyone I spoke to told me that a big part of the problem lies with cheap, poor quality cables. You can probably do without the cheap options that are available for a few pesos. Invest in more robust cables and you will save money on replacement.

A good option are braided cableswhich use tight-fitting textiles or a woven nylon mesh over the cables instead of a plastic covering. “It’s a good rule of thumb” says Wiens. Even Apple has opted for braided cables in its most recent models, simply because the strength and shielding of the braids offer better protection.

Objectively, all this is secondary. Cables are probably the least flashy piece of technology in your life. Its function is practical. And if they work, they can be ignored.

But if you ignore them incorrectly, they will end up failing you.