Ikea Alex drawers - making a drawer into a charging station

Salty22

Salty22

Salty22

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10 Jan 2013
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We’ve got a double desk in the living room for two peoples made of a kitchen side board and 3 sets of Ikeas iconic Alex drawers.
In the middle coming from one pc we’ve got a powered 7 port USB, 3 of them are fast charge ports which we use for all the phones, tablets and wireless headphones etc, so there’s normally always 2-3 things on the desk, and a jumble of wires.

Came up with the idea of turning the top drawer of the middle Alex unit into a charging station of sorts, making a hole in the back of the unit at the top and feeding a cable through into the drawer, fixing the USB hub into the drawer (3m strip?) and leaving enough slack to be able to open and close the drawer.
One of the good things about the alex drawers is the gap at the front would let me have cables coming out the front even with the drawer shut if for example my headphones need charging while I use them.

Anyone ever done anything like this? Any idea or input would be really helpful.
 
Sounds like you have the same setup as us. Interesting idea though to keep clutter off your desktop.

We also had laminate worktop from IKEA, which is quite heavy and the weight has caused some slight bowing in the Alex drawers. Not sure how long they are going to last.
 
Haven’t got any pics of when I did it but I’ll take it apart and show you all when I finish work in an hour. Basically took the top drawer out, used a hole bore drill bit to drill a 1.5cm hole into the backing board(basically big enough to fit a usb through).

Then drilled the same size hole in the back of the top drawer, I thought about just having the cable going over the top but the wires going through the back of the drawer stops the powered usb Hub from falling out of the back of the drawer ever.

It’s got just enough cable slack on the usb and power cables to let the draw open fully, we’ve got a lightning, mini usb and usb c cable in the drawer
 
The number of USB devices I have on charge sometimes is just silly. I have a 5 port desktop USB hub but annoyingly it can only supply 2A to 2 ports, the other 3 seem to be 300-500mA.

Been thinking about getting a bookshelf/pigeon hole type thing and wiring a couple of good USB power supplies to each compartment
 
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