How to Retrofit a Docking Drawer Blade Outlet Into a Kitchen DrawerUpdated a year ago

Get a detailed walkthrough on how to install a Docking Drawer Blade outlet into your existing kitchen drawer.

“Today, we are going to install a Docking Drawer in an existing kitchen, existing cabinets with existing power, and I'm going to show you how to do that. So we are going to put a Docking Drawer here in this drawer. It's going to be our kitchen junk organizational drawer with power so that we can throw devices in there and charge them. It's not super difficult to do if you have a little bit of experience with electrical. If you don't, all of this that I'm doing today could be accomplished by an electrician in under an hour. I've got a multimeter here to verify that the power is off before I start working on anything electrical. This is super important. You don't have one of these. It's simply you can turn on the disposal and then go start turning breakers off until the disposal turns off. Then that way you know you've got the correct breaker. I'm going to convert this single duplex outlet here into a double duplex. It's basically two sets of outlets like this. And so what that's going to allow me to do is plug in the dishwasher and the disposal here and the Docking Drawer here.

The Docking Drawer in this case is going really close. It's just going in the next bay over here. So I use a dual gang box and just put two outlets together. But I want to emphasize that it would have been possible if I wanted to split this up and add a set of outlets here for the disposal and for the dishwasher and then remote locate this anywhere else in the whole kitchen. So instead of using a single double gang, I could have used two single gang boxes and connected them together with the MCAP cable. But because this is all going in one spot, I just decided to use this because it's a little bit less work. Next, I'm going to remove the outlet itself. Now, I'm going to connect this to where that outlet used to be. So now you can see that's installed there. So this is the flex 90. This is the MCAP cable. This little cover plate covers where that outlet used to go. All right, so here we are. We're set up to do our cutting the hole in the back of the drawer box. So I've got my workspace set up here.

I've got a Docking Drawer. I'm just going to eyeball where I want it to go because this drawer is so wide, we really have a lot of space to work with. I'm just going to center it and just double check here just that this is basically in the center, which it is right there. Once that is in the center, then I'm just going to make a couple of marks here to have a reference of what I'm going to do. Then I'm going to grab my template. This is a Duo, of course, so I'll be using the Duo template. I'm going to center this guy. Once I get that centered, then I'm going to tape it in place. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to just use a little punch and a little hammer to mark the four corners. Now I can remove my template, toss that. Then I'm going to get a straight edge. I'm going to give myself some lines so that I can cut straight. One last check. This is straight, it's square, it's centered, it's in the location where I want. Now I can cut this. The tool that I like to use is a multi tool.

This is a multi tool. Every contractor has one of these. You can also drill holes and then use a jigsaw. The template is set up for either method, but this is my personal favorite. Now I'm just going to go for it. Just verify that it's going to go in there. Look at that, like a glove. Now we're ready to take the drawer back down and install it. Now I'm going to just fit the Docking Drawer in here, get it installed first. The best way to install the drawer is to pull these other ones out so that you have room to work. There's a great video on our website that gives a lot more detail. It's important to get the rear bracket positioned correctly so that the arms are parallel and that they center between the back of the drawer box and the rear of the cabinet. Mark where you think it's going to go. I'm just going to hold the screwdriver there and then just test it like this. And we can see that, yeah, it moves smoothly. Okay, now we're and then I'm going to mark it, and then I'll take my first screw and get that one in.

So that looks pretty good. It's centered, they're parallel. Then I just get the rest of the screws in, two more. Get the Docking Drawer cord ready. I'm going to use these little cord clips, which you can buy on the website. They're super cheap, but they'll just help hold the cord so it doesn't interfere with the other drawers. And that'll just hold the cord up against the back of the drawer. That just makes the installation nice and neat. And then the last thing that we do is just plug in the Docking Drawer. We were lucky, we already had a hole here. I don't know why, but the contractor had drilled a big cut out here, but if you didn't have one, you could just use a hole saw to make a two inch diameter hole and that plug will just come right through. We've got our outlets installed, the dishwasher and the disposal are plugged back in, the Docking Drawer’s plugged back in. All you need to do is clean up and take the rest of those drawers back and we're done.”