Gadgetory

what's up guys is Antoine Goodwin and today we're talking about extension cords but this is seen it though you know it's no regular extension cord let's take a look at the Robo reel which is a motorized power cord management system the body of the Robo reel is about the same size shape and color of a basketballs a big sphere it's held in place by this sort of plastic frame that also doubles as a carrying handle when you want to carry it around somewhere it's got these sort of rubber points where the it actually meets the ground so that combined with the fact that it's really low means you don't really have to worry about knocking this thing over when it comes time to use it now the top half of the sphere spins freely through 360 degrees so you don't really have to worry about snagging it on anything you can just kind of whip the cable around where you want and the cable itself pulls freely from the center of the reel now at one Dan you get this sort of heavy terminal you've got three standard outlets all of those are about one hundred ten hundred twenty Watts fifteen amps of power and about 1,800 watts of total energy can come through here before you start running into problems we also got these indicator lights to let you know that you actually do have juice and at the other end you've got your standard sort of male outlet that goes into the wall that's fused so you don't really have to worry about any sort of surge issues the cable actually pulls freely and there's no sort of spring-loaded pull back so you have to worry about it snatching the tool out of your hand when you're in the middle cutting some wood or something like that when it's time for you to bring the cable in you tap this button one time to shut off power to the Robo reel unit touch it again and a 100 in 80 volt electric motor actually holds the cable back in automatically let's say to stage motor so it pulls pretty quickly at the beginning but over the last couple of feet it slows down a little bit so you don't get this sorted in whipping around all unsafely and users can customize the point at which it does slow down so if you wanted to slow down a little bit sooner you can do that it also has some safety features built in including thermal protection so you don't have to worry about it bursting into flames you've got surge protection you've also got an automatic cut off feature so if you're working on something and this cable gets severed the power to the whole unit instantly shuts off no fear of electrocution there and when the cable is being retracted if it gets stuck or snagged on something it automatically stops the drag back so you have to worry about knocking over all sorts of things in your house a garage so we've actually got two drawbacks that I kind of want to talk about here the first one is kind of small the other one kind of big the small one is that the Robo wheel is kind of loud you're drawing the cable out it makes a lot of sort of electrical motor whirring noise and when it's time to draw the cable back in it makes even more noise now if you're in your garage that's probably not that big of a deal but if you're using this thing around the house where people can be disturbed by the noise you're gonna want to keep an ear out for that the other minor issue is the price this thing is two hundred and seventy nine dollars now that's a lot of money for an extension cord even one as advanced as this one but if you've got pockets deep enough to swing it perhaps it's worth it to never have to coil a cable again you can check out the full review of the Robo reel over on cnet.com until then i'm antoine Goodwin and we've been taking a look at the Robo reel motorized power cord management system