One problem that crops up with treadmills is static electricity. I've experienced it and for the most part the only thing that happened was a small zap when I touch the aluminum frame of my keyboard - basically I was grounding myself through the USB port on my KVM.

With the new 4K monitors I would occasionally experience brief instances of the screen distorting or going black. My monitors aren't routed though the KVM (it's DVI model, not DisplayPort) so I initially thought the problem was related to the monitor cables being 15 feet long, which I think is the max for passive cables, and that they were going past the motor on the treadmill.

I tried re-routing the cables so they wouldn't go past the motor. It seemed like it helped some, but the screens would still briefly cut out.


I started researching active cables and was surprised at how expensive they were. I then got to thinking that maybe the static was causing an issue even though it hadn't with the old monitors. I bought an anti-static wrist strap and a grounding adaptor


The alligator clip comes off the cord revealing a banana clip.


The banana clip plugs into the grounding adaptor


Plugged in


I have to put the strap on my forearm else it interferes with typing.


To test it out I wore some polyester pajama pants that I had stopped wearing on the treadmill due to the amount of static electricity they would generate. The test was successful, not once did I get shocked when touching the keyboard and the monitors never distorted or blacked out.