WHEN TO ADMIT DEFEAT

I had one of my kidneys removed in September of 2020. I awoke from that surgery steeped in many thoughts, one of which is "I should build a gym in my backyard".

The thing is, the pandemic was raging. We were six months into a two-week lockdown, so really, there was no end in sight. I wanted to get back into shape but a public gym was out of the question.

I'll talk about the gym build process another time but in short, on January 1st, 2021, I was exercising on my machines in my gym with zero risk of catching COVID-19.

For the first year of the gym's existence, I literally ran an extension cord from my house through a sock-stuffed hole in the back of the gym to give it power. Eventually, my brother-in-law and I trenched the backyard and installed proper, up-to-code wiring in conduit that we buried three feet down.

The inside of the gym was another story, though. I didn't want to poke holes or have to redo drywall, so I put all the wiring on the surface. The ingress point in the gym has a steel, dual-gang electrical box with an outlet on one side and a 20 Amp switch on the other. The outlet side has an off-the-shelf surge protector for the devices downstream of that but the switch side is "bare"; no surge protection at all.

I put the switch there so I could work on that side without having to go all the way to my house's breaker box any time I wanted to do work...though I always shut off the breaker anyway, so...safety first, I guess? The wire placement in there is custom-suited to the layout of the gym and my very specific, first-world needs.

There's an outlet close to the floor near where the elliptical and bicycle are. There's a steel junction box on the ceiling in the middle, and there's an outlet at the top of the wall near the front of the gym. The outlet that feeds the exercise machines has a surge protector on it, of course. I don't want the machines to be subject to lightning strikes, of which there are many during monsoon season. But the other two branches have no protection.

I could put a surge protector on the outlet by the front but the junction box on the ceiling feeds the gym's Wi-Fi access point and the lights. There's a wireless switch that controls the lights (it's RF, not Wi-Fi, Zigbee, or Z-Wave, so it continues to work even when I'm messing around with my infrastructure). Those things are just...exposed to the outside world. The switch would be a cheap thing to replace but the notion of the access point dying needlessly just annoys me.

So, I started down the path of doing something...unconventional. Rather than installing a "whole-home surge protector" or one of those in-panel things with the pigtail ground on it, I bought an "industrial" surge protector power strip on Amazon with the intention of wiring the gym's mains directly into it. It would give me two outlets up there and the third would be cut out of the circuit in favor of surge protecting everything downstream.

The best laid plans...

I measured everything multiple times. I snipped the wires to remove the third outlet. I 3D-printed a replacement for the removed outlet (it's just a plastic slug with "GameDr04" on it). I was ready. So I then removed the section of wire that fed that side of the gym.

Even after that, I was still on track.

But then I tried to marry the downstream wiring to the surge protector....in-situ. The thing about 12 AWG wire is that it's thick; way too thick to work with in the back of a hot gym with no lights and inside the confines of a 3"x2" (cross-section), extruded aluminum case.

I tried all kinds of things but the only solution is to swap out solid copper wire for 12 AWG stranded wire. I'll be able to shape it accordingly, solder it if needed, then attach it to the solid wire via wire nuts, those wire-nut-like things that just "bite" the wire, or more likely: a butt connector.

Perhaps there will be a "Part II" of this little saga. Perhaps I'll accomplish my goal. For both or either, only time will tell.