Product Spotlight: Retractable Power Reel
There are a handful of tools I use in the shop where the power cord is never quite long enough: my sander, tracksaw and pressure washer to name a few. Obviously, extension cords are a thing, but it’s always feels like a huge pain to have to coil up the cord after I’m done (first world problems much?).
The obvious solution is to get a retractable cord reel but I have an additional complication: the majority of cord reels are geared at being mounted high up on the wall or ceiling and my shop has a fairly low ceiling make this less than ideal.
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Placement
Since my shop has a relatively low ceiling and I have the added ceiling-complication of a garage-screen-door and random bulkheads, I specifically didn’t want to mount any cord reel high up (ceiling or wall). When I initially laid things out in the shop, I mounted my compressor hose-reel close to the floor — ideally, I would run this cord reel in that same general area.
By opting not to wall/ceiling mount my cord reel, and specifically, mounting it in this compact space, this introduces a requirement that the reel not flop around. My air reel has a fixed-frame, no-flopping-around design, so this was roughly what I was hoping to replicate, but for power.
This criteria ends up being the most difficult one to meet as the majority of reels seem to be designed to dangle from the ceiling. The design of having the cord reel dangle is so that you can simply ‘pull it and go’; by having a design that doesn’t dangle, it’s on me to extend the cord and make sure there is slack before walking off in random directions. I’m the type of user that
Additional criteria
In addition to the no-flopping design, I wanted two other features:
Single outlet: the tools I plan on using the extension cord for (power planer, track saw, etc.) are “single-tasker” tools - I’m going to be purely focused on using that tool and only that tool, so I only need the singular power cable to support that.
The power cord: in an ideal world, I’d want a (roughly) 50-foot reel of 12AWG but with the no-flopping design, this would be cost-prohibitive. Something more realistic would be in the 25-50 foot range, using 14AWG. This would let me comfortably power things like my track saw without worrying about amperage. As for length, for tool I’d be using in the shop, 10-15 feet would be plenty, the additional reach would allow me to have a bit more flexibility when using my pressure washer.
Woods retractable reel
If you’re in the market for a pro-grade reel (read: you have a much bigger budget), it’s quite possible to find a reel that hits all of my objectives from brands like Reelcraft or Coxreels. I was able to find a retractable reel made by Woods/Southwire that seems to hit all my needs.
Retractable reel by Woods/Southwire (Model 48004)
Looking at the mounting plate, this looked super-promising: could there be through holes for running bolts? perhaps a slot/dovetail style bracket that we could drop the entire hose reel into? Even the box and manual suggest that this can mounted flat on a shelf/floor:
Big. Fat. Nope.
I’ll skip to the end: this reel was designed to be ceiling/wall mounted in a floppy manner. Anything suggesting that this is designed to be floor or shelf mounted is, at best, an afterthought. Also, seriously? Freestanding floor operation — has anyone ever tried to use a retractable (anything) in ‘freestanding mode’? Apparently the documentation folks don’t realize if you pull on the extension cord, uh, the entire reel will just come with you for the ride.
The reel comes with a swivelling wall/ceiling plate that doesn’t have any way of locking in place (to keep from flopping).
That being said, this reel is the closest I’ve seen that could be flat mounted.
Shelf-mounting
In hindsight, you could just drill a few holes through the bottom plate and run bolts/screws through to anchor it down and be done. At the time, I wasn’t sure if
I was going to keep this reel and
The plastic on the base gave me a vibe that it wouldn’t drill nicely and might chip and break
So I wanted to find a different way to non-destructively mount this.
Prototyping
I had a bunch of 3/4 x 3/4 furniture braces that I could use: I use the existing mounting pins to tie into the furniture braces and in turn, the furniture brace would be tied down to some wood which I could then mount.
Final mount
For the actual final mount, I opted to remove the embedded nut on the underside of the baseplate - this turns the L-bolt into a quick-release pin. I mounted this buffer-base onto a scrap of wood which now lets me mount the reel to a flat surface.
Fixing the catch
So on the very first pull after finally mounting the reel, the latching mechanism failed. I wasn’t terribly upset as I kind of expected this to happen — this is a cheap reel and it’s designed like other cheap reels I’ve used before. Thankfully fixing this is fairly straightforward: pop the housing apart, play with the latching mechanism until it engages (shown below is after the fix - the teeth are engaging the latch).
Disassembling the reel to tweak the retractactable ‘catch’
Closing thoughts
I imagine nobody at Woods/Southwire actually tried to floor/shelf mount this prior to suggesting that it could totally be usable in such configurations but thankfully, this was an easy thing to retrofit. As an extension cord, it’s … fine? I was able to use it with my track saw without any issues.
One thing to note is that, the leader-wire is in fixed position (which you would expect), but unlike my air-reel, you can’t rotate the housing of the reel which means the leader-wire will always have to come out the right side — something to consider depending on the location of your outlet (thinking about this a bit more, you may be able to reorient the reel by disassembling it and flipping the entire assembling within the chassis - lol, I’m not desperate enough for that hassle).
In summary:
As a retractable reel? There are better (12AWG) options if you don’t need it to be fixed in place
It is possible to mount this such that is becomes fixed in place (you could probably also just drill mounting holes through the plastic base)
This is a cheapo-style retractable mechanism — so you may need to pop it apart to fix it once in a while
If you need a fixed-in-place design, this is likely one of the only affordable options there are
All done for now
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