I have owned a 100 foot extension cord for many years, long before my handymanning career began. I used it mainly for running power down from my 2nd floor apartment so I could vacuum my car.
Of course, with all the handymanning, I have been using it a lot. And with all this added use of it, a chronic problem has become highly vexing, which is, how to coil the darn thing up when I am done with it. As it is, it gets tangled in a ball of orange spaghetti and it takes way too long to get it untangled and usable for the next job.
I had looked into this previously, but all the advice I found on YouTube last year was, well, less than perfect. So I looked again and found this device at Home Depot– it’s essentially a big orange spool:
However, some fabulous folks on YouTube offered a marvelous hack which makes it work even better than designed.
The way it’s designed, you hook the midway point of the cable on the axle, and then I guess you wind/ unwind it. However, the trouble with this setup is, you unwind both ends at once, and so you have to stand at the midway point of your cable run to unwind, then walk the male end to the outlet and then walk the female end to the job. Pretty clunky.
So these hackers told me to cut a hole in the axle and feed the female end thru there, VIOLA:
(I pull the male end out of the sprocket hole to allow the thing to turn, it’s stuck in there now for storage purposes). 
So now all I have to do it plug it in, then walk to the job, unwinding a single cable as I go . . . plug in my devices, then just wind it up on the walk back to the power source.
I am making good use of all this downtime!!
— JL
