Ever wish you could bolt down your iPhone or iPad charger to an outlet so it doesn’t walk away? A neat little accessory lets you do just that called Lock Socket, was sent to me to review and today I’m going to give you all the details of how it works.
Originally prototyped to stop the loss of chargers around the house, the Lock Socket has many uses for homes, businesses, and schools, working best with official Apple/Samsung charging blocks for the best fit.
Each type of charger lock aptly conforms to the dimensions of each block, allowing minimal wiggle room and allowing the cable to fit through. Fitting on standard or Decora wall plates, the seamless white color blends in nicely with its environment.
It’s also worth noting that the Lock Socket is also available for other products such as some Samsung devices, a 3-Pronged charger lock and even a red version of the 3-Pronged charger lock.
Design
With each Lock Socket, you get the plastic “lock,” two Allen head screws (different lengths), and the matching 2 mm Allen key. The main portion uses sturdy (non-flexible) plastic that would make it difficult to break with bare hands.
As you’ve probably already deduced, this isn’t a true locking solution, but the likelihood of people having a 2 mm Allen key on them is probably slim. Lock Socket offers enough hassle that most people will probably not bother trying to break the charger free. They will move on and try and find one that’s not secured in place.
One more note on the design. Lock Sockets work with both standard duplex outlets with the cover plate screw hole in the middle or newer Decora style (rectangular outlets) that use cover plate screw holes on top and bottom. Unfortunately if you have cover plates that require no screws at all, you’ll be required to swap it out for one that does to be able to use Lock Socket.
Lock Socket Uses
For household use, we found the Lock Socket to be most beneficial for those places where you always have a charger in place or where you wouldn’t want guests or friends to “borrow” it. Where I think this would be hugely beneficial is for businesses such as cafes or offices where they allow others to use the services of charging their devices but having a Lock Socket would help prevent their charging cables to come up missing. Another good example is something like nurses. They can plug their charging brick and cable into the outlet at the nurses stating and use a Lock Socket to keep it in place. Then at the end of the shift they can quickly remove it and take it home.
As for durability, the Locks screw and plastic hold pretty well, and if someone were to trip over the Lock Socket or a charger cable, it wouldn’t break or let the charger out of place. We think that the Lock Socket would be helpful in pet or child-proofing a house, limiting smaller and more curious lifeforms from getting themselves hurt or unplugging chargers.
Final Thoughts
Lock Socket has so many great uses that almost makes it a must have product for around the house, business or office. At such a cheap price of $16.95 as of the writing of this review, that makes it even more worth picking up a few.
Super quick and easy to install, very durable build quality and the fact that this will likely help save you or your office a bit of money by not having to replace the charging cable constantly, Lock Socket is something I highly recommend to everyone.
@cliffwade Oh how I wish those things worked better. I gave up installing them at work because people would just walk off with chargers.
Had a lot of back and forth with the other departments and straight up told them we're not supplying power bricks for ipads anymore 😅
@cliffwade I told them the only way we'd do it is with something along the lines of these covers and locks lol
This is an awesome little product. I had my doubts about when I received it, but it’s actually got a lot of good uses. Highly recommended that you give them a try.
I haven’t used these in an actual work environment mainly since I work from home, but I can see where they would work pretty well, but could possibly not in certain situations. Supplying power bricks can get costly pretty quick.