Old remote controls that don’t match anything: what to actually do with them
Open the drawer and there are five or six of them: a couple you can name on sight, and a handful of black rectangles with half the labels rubbed off that could belong to anything. A television nobody in the house has owned in years. A DVD player. Something that might be for the ceiling fan, or might not be. You don't throw them out, not because you think you'll need them, but because there's no way to be sure you won't.
Why this drawer fills the same way the cable drawer does
A remote weighs almost nothing and gives no sign of how long it has sat unused, so keeping it costs you nothing you can feel. Throwing out the one remote that turns out to matter feels like the opposite: a specific, annoying afternoon spent hunting for a replacement or fumbling with a phone app that doesn't quite do the same thing. When one side of a decision feels free and the other feels like a real cost, the free side wins by default, and a drawer fills up with objects nobody actually decided to keep — they just never lost the argument against keeping them.
The question is never what the remote is — it's whether you still own what it points at
A remote by itself has no value at all; it's a small plastic object whose entire purpose is to control one other thing. That means the only question worth asking is not "what is this" but "do I still own the thing this operates," and unlike a lot of clutter decisions, that one usually has a fast, checkable answer.
A test that takes less time than deciding whether to keep it
Walk the drawer around the house instead of trying to remember from the couch. For each remote, point it at whatever it might be for and press the most obvious button — power, or channel up. If a device responds, you have your answer in about two seconds, and the remote goes back near that device, not into the drawer. If nothing in the house responds and you genuinely cannot place what it once matched, that's your answer too. A remote for a device that has left the house has nothing left to control, no matter how clean the buttons still look.
Whatever survives that walk-through and is still a mystery — no device answers, and you can't picture what it went with — goes into one small dated box, the same move that works for unidentified cables. Not a decision you're avoiding, just one you're putting off on purpose, with a date attached instead of an open-ended maybe.
The case cables don't have: it might belong to something you gave away, not something broken
Cables usually pile up because a device died or got replaced. Remotes have a second, easy-to-miss path in: the television got sold, donated, or handed down, and the remote — smaller, easier to overlook while carrying a screen down the stairs — got left behind by accident. If a device is about to leave the house, the small habit worth building is keeping the remote with it on the way out, the same way you'd keep a charger with a laptop. It saves the next person a needless separate purchase, and it saves you a mystery remote a few months from now.
Why "it might be expensive to replace" rarely holds up
Weigh what you're actually protecting against. Most remotes for common devices — TVs, streaming boxes, soundbars — are cheap to replace by model number, and a growing number of devices can also be run from a companion app on a phone in the meantime, so a missing remote is rarely the emergency it once was. A remote that would genuinely be a hassle to replace belongs to a device you use often enough to already know exactly what it is, which means it was never really heading for the unmarked pile in the first place. The remotes you truly can't place are, almost by definition, for things you wouldn't miss.
What to do with the ones you let go
Take the batteries out first — old batteries left inside for years are the most common way a stored remote turns into a leak that ruins whatever it's sitting near. Remotes are small electronics, not household rubbish, so they belong with the same e-waste drop-off as cables and old chargers: an electronics retailer, a recycling centre, sometimes a bin in an office building. It's rarely worth a dedicated trip; folded into a supermarket run, it costs you the ten seconds it takes to hand it over.
Where an inventory helps, if you keep one
Remotes aren't a category most people think to log, and they don't need to be — but if you're already keeping a home inventory for things that are easy to misplace or duplicate, the same instinct applies here: what matters is not a description of the object but what it operates. A remote logged against a device is one you'll never again mistake for an unidentified spare.
What "done" looks like
Not a drawer with nothing in it. A drawer where every remote you kept has a device it answers to, and the one small dated box of true unknowns has an expiry — if nothing has come looking for what's inside by the date you wrote, that absence is your answer.