This episode is for Jen in Boston. She traveled with me to Mongolia back in July, and before the trip she asked if she should purchase a universal power adapter. I flat out told her no, no hesitation. Well, today's podcast is my official mea culpa. I'm walking back my repeated advice to travelers not to buy universal power adapters. For years I've said don't bother buying one, and I had pretty good reasons. All of the universal power adapters I'd seen on the market until now were these giant bulky things. They were heavy, they took up way too much room, and a lot of them were just junk. I've actually had customers travel with these things and have had them literally fry in the wall.
Pretty much all of these were so big and heavy that you'd plug them into the wall, put your charger into the adapter, only for it to slowly fall out of the outlet. So you'd wake up the next morning thinking your camera batteries were fully charged, only to discover that the adapter had given up after you'd tucked yourself into bed. So based on all that, I said, don't buy a universal adapter. Well, I'm taking that back, at least partially. I still don't recommend those giant ridiculously bulky things, but I have changed my mind about carrying a small one. And specifically, there's one from a company called Anker that I think is worth considering. I'm not sponsored by Anjer. I just think they make pretty good stuff. And their universal adapter is the smallest one I've ever seen. Now, I want to be clear about something. I'm not saying you should throw away all those little dedicated plug adapters I've recommended in the past.
I still like those a lot. In fact, I still think you should travel with at least one of those plus the anker because sooner or later, one of your adapters is going to stop working or you're going to leave it behind in a hotel room. So what happened that made me change my mind? Back in August, I went to Botswana. Before I went, I looked up the electrical plug requirements for Botswana. And what I found said Botswana uses the D-plug, which is a three-prong plug with very large round pins. And I found that to be true, sort of. That's the plug standard you'll find in most private homes. But when I got to my hotel, I was suddenly dealing with the UK type G outlets. Those are the ones with the square pins, which I had not prepared for. But Botswana wasn't the only problem. I had a layover in London, and as I just stated, I only had the Botswana converter, so I couldn't plug in there either. It didn't bother me so much because my layover wasn't all that long, but that's when I had the annoying realization a universal power adapter would actually have been really useful. It wouldn't have solved everything because none of them have the type D plug that is used in Botswana, but it would have covered the UK plug I needed in London.
What I haven't mentioned and what I didn't consider carefully enough was that I also had short stops in Zimbabwe and Zambia where they use type D, G, and sometimes C. C is the Central European Standard. That's the two small pins which is also included in all universal converters. So it was a bit of a mess. I still hold that the problem with universal adapters is that almost all the ones I've seen have been enormous, poorly designed and unreliable. And due to the size and cost, no one I have ever met carries a backup. The anker still doesn't solve all the problems, but it begins to. The dedicated adapter solves all of these problems, but is rather inconvenient if you're jumping regions, and doesn't solve the problem of poor planning. So if you're traveling internationally and your itinerary involves multiple countries, or you have layovers in different regions and you don't necessarily know what you're going to encounter, carrying a universal power adapter starts to make a lot of sense. You might be going from one country where you expect one plug standard and then discover that your hotel uses something completely different. So I'm still going to carry dedicated plug adapters because they're really reliable, but I'm also going to start carrying one small universal adapter as an insurance policy.
For more travel tips, head back to episode 177 and 148.
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