Travel Tech Tip – USB Charge Hubs

Cute room right? Aside from being the most expensive place we stayed while we were in Mexico (it was on the main drag in Playa over New Year’s) it was a great room – spotlessly clean, comfortable beds, pool steps away from the sliding door… But you know what you can’t see… Because it didn’t have any… Wall sockets… Yeah those things in the wall that make it possible to make coffee… or have lamps… or keep beer cold… or charge electronic devices. I mean it did have a couple but they were being used for things like lamps and keeping the beer cold… so no wall sockets…

When the three of us travel together, we each bring our iPhones – hey don’t judge – Marie and Caitlin don’t bring cameras when they travel so they use their phones for taking pictures and I use my iPhone for connecting to data when we don’t have access to Wifi (Google Maps makes navigating in new places a breeze) and for taking pictures when my Nikon DSLR is overkill. Having watched more than one hapless tourist get reamed-out for taking pictures when they shouldn’t, there’s no way I’m pulling out the DSLR in “no picture” settings… but an iPhone’s a whole new game…

Marie and I also bring our iPads when we travel. Okay maybe judge us for that… But I use my iPad to update the blog and to backup pictures  – and it’s much more convenient to load my iPad up with books for lazy afternoons than it is to pack a bunch of them in my carry-on (where would I put the duty free booze if I did that)…  And Marie usually has to do at least some work while we’re traveling so… iPads…

That’s 5 charge blocks needing 5 available plugs… As best I can remember, we have never stayed in any place with 5 available plugs so we always used to play the “who gets to charge their device tonight game” which usually led to the “my iPad didn’t get charged so now I can’t do the blog” game or the “do you really want to deal with sleep-deprived Caitlin on a 3 hour bus ride in the dark without some kind of distraction?” game.

But we’re not done yet… We also bring at least one portable battery pack for charging electronics when we’re on buses and other places where we don’t have access to power. So now we’re up to 6 plugs… Add one more for my camera battery charger and that’s 7… Most North American hotels don’t have that many available plugs… and you can only unplug so many lights…

So a while back someone suggested using a USB charge hub like this one which lets you charge up to 7 devices (drawing a max of 8.8 amps) from a single wall plug. It has a couple of downsides – it has a blue LED “power on” light that is bright enough to light an entire hotel room (covering it with a piece of duct tape blocks some of the light). While it looks cute and tiny, it’s actually quite bulky because of the transformer block (or whatever the heck it’s called). And it was sort of pricy… but we’ve used it on our last 5-6 trips and it’s performed flawlessly (aside from that freaking blue light…). It’s been retired from travel duties but is doing yeoman service at home where it does a great job of keeping our various battery packs and other portable electronics charged.

Recently, we (okay, mainly me) have been trying to travel without checked bags so I’ve been looking for ways to cut down on bulk and weight. That led to picking up one of these units from Amazon. It’s quite a bit smaller (no transformer block so what you see is pretty much what you get in terms of bulk and weight). It also allows for 12A total current draw – although it only allows for charging 6 devices at a time. It’s also fair bit cheaper. We’ll be putting it through its travel paces when we head to Spain in a couple of weeks but so far it’s been working well in home trials so we’re not anticipating any issues.

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