Everyone has heard the term “a nest of wires”, and with good reason; left to their own devices, wires take on a new lease of life as a tangled nest of cables snaking around each other. The solution lies in using electrical wire labels and markers to both identify, and group them.

Out of the Box Solutions

Most manufactures of electronic goods (such as PC monitors, printers and HDMI equipped televisions) these days supply some form of ‘cable tidy’ solution when they ship their products.

For example, look behind you monitor, and you may well see that one cable has a kind of stud-and-hole belt-loop on it, designed to keep together the various cables that go into it.

However, this isn’t enough when you have a real nest of wires to contend with.

Wire Markers vs. Labels

At the cheap end of the spectrum of solutions available, there are simple colour-coded markers.

If you have a few wires, and a decent system in place (for noting which colour means what!) this may well be the best solution. It is simple and cost effective, and requires nothing more than a notebook to keep track of the colour-coded assignments.

Next up, there are sleeve designs that enable you to print a label which can then be stuck onto, or around, the wire, so that it is labelled with a meaningful code. Of course, if you only have a few devices, the actual device name can be printed on — “PC”, “printer”, and so on.

However, unless you buy a specific type of label that can be written on with a CD marker, you will need to have a label printer handy to print of the labels.

The investment is only worth it if you have a nest of cables: model rail enthusiasts, for example, often have a lot of wires to keep track of!

A better, but more expensive solution are the kind of labels that have a tag on which to write a comment, and a wire-tie fixing to loop around the cable, or even a bunch of cables.

This brings us back, in a way, to the opening observation that these sometimes already come pre-installed on the back of devices (like TVs or monitors) or their power cables.

The difference is that these tend to be a uniform black, and have nowhere to write on. The advantage of labels and markers that are at least colour coded, and at best give a clear space for labelling, is clear.

So, whether fir office use (server rooms, open plan office spaces, etc.), hobbies (such as model railways) or behind the home entertainment console, electrical wire labels are a must wherever there’s a chance of the “nest of cables” appearing!