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Clocks Gone Haywire

E

elffriend

Gone But Not Forgotten
(ACCOUNT RETIRED)
Joined
Mar 31, 2004
Messages
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I have to tell you about the clocks at my work place. There are two battery operated wall clocks in here and about 10 days ago I came to work and they both had the wrong time displayed, so I duly let the caretaker know and he changed the batteries.

Two days after the battery change one of the clocks again had the wrong time displayed, about 3 hours slow and batteries were again changed. But every morning since then it has displayed the wrong time, always a couple of hours slow.

Yesterday that clock was 10 minutes fast and the other clock was 2 hours slow. Today the fast clock is 2 hours slow and the other one is 6 hours slow.

Dodgy clocks I hear you say. However, and this is where I can't figure out what is happening. All day the clocks keep time, but however many hours fast or slow. They don't speed up or slow down when the library is open, only overnight or the weekend. The library is shut when I leave and I put steel shutters over the doors and I open it up in the morning. No-one else except the caretaker has access.

I can't figure it out. :confused:

I have attached clock picture.
 
Are the clocks by any chance radio controlled? I have the same problem where I work as I'm right down in the Mersey basin underneath the giant Stockport viaduct so we don't get a good signal. If the batteries are only half dead the clocks seem to have difficulty keeping the right time and end up exactly 4 hours slow in most cases.
 
pi23 said:
Are the clocks by any chance radio controlled? I have the same problem where I work as I'm right down in the Mersey basin underneath the giant Stockport viaduct so we don't get a good signal. If the batteries are only half dead the clocks seem to have difficulty keeping the right time and end up exactly 4 hours slow in most cases.
Click to expand...

Definatley not. They were fine up until 10 days ago and I have been here 2 years. They are just normal clocks and they are still keeping time even as I speak. Just slow.
 
Sounds bizarre, but i noticed something weird on the clock in my bathroom recently.

Similar situation - kept time fine, except would lose a certain amount of time overnight, EVERY night.

It perplexed me for ages and then I worked it out. In my case, the close was hanging on the wall in such an angle (with the base against the wall and the top of the clock slightly away from the wall) so that every time the clock reached 6 o'clock, the minute and hour hand would touch each other (due to gravity and the cheap manufacture of the clock I guess) and 'stick' for a while.

I don't know exactly what free'd the minute/hour hand up, but eventually they would get past each other and the clock would carry on keeping time as normal.

Not saying this is exactly the same situation, especially as two clocks are involved....just highlighting that there is probably a very mundane reason for the clocks odd timekeeping!!
 
I think there is a very mundane reason I just find this all very odd and coincidental that both clocks are behaving in this way.
 
Clocks have a habit of doing odd things. I have a book by Magnus Pike which describes the case of a grandfather clock which always stopped on the same day (thursday I think). How did the clock know it was Thursday?

The mystry was solved when he worked out that the clock used a weight on a chain to drive it. If the clock was always wound on Sunday, by thursday the lenght of chain was the same length as the pendulum and would start to swing with the same frequency - this would disrupt and eventualy stop he mechanism.

o stories about electric clocks though!
 
I did think that someone put dud batteries in, but why do they keep time in the day?

It's confusing me now because I don't have a clock that tells the right time in here. I can't reach them to set the right time as you need a ladder.
 
This sounds like a problem that I've been having for most of my life: every single clock or watch I have in the house is set to a different, incorrect time. I cannot seem to get a single one of them to keep time properly. This was a problem in college, when my roommate's clocks all started to do the same thing. To this day I haven't been able to come up with a satisfactory explanation for this.

However - and ironically, I suppose - I work for a Swiss watch company now. :cool:
 
Okay todays clock update

Last night I checked the clocks, they were still keeping time, albeit slow. As I was looking at one of the clocks it stopped and was still stopped when I left an hour later.

This morning the clock was working again, but now 4 hours slow.

The clocks are now the right time (I risked my neck and stood on the desks to put them right bloody caretakers couldn't find the time) and they are still keeping time.

Will keep you updated but I am assuming dud batteries.
 
I know you're pretty much certain but I think you should double check to see if they are radio controlled clocks - the stopping and then being a exactly a few hours wrong points to this explanation over all others to me.
 
pi23 said:
I know you're pretty much certain but I think you should double check to see if they are radio controlled clocks - the stopping and then being a exactly a few hours wrong points to this explanation over all others to me.
Click to expand...

I checked when I set the right time on them this morning and they are standard clocks, not radio controlled.

I checked out the batteries and they have different makes in them. One clock stopped at 845 (which makes me think there is a problem with the hands as it stopped at 545 last night). However the other one is still correct.

When I get some new batteries I suspect they will work properly again. :D
 
Okay it gets stranger folks.

The clock which stopped this morning at 845am suddenly started working again at 145pm.

The other clock stopped at...........245pm.

Still waiting for new batteries and an explanation :D
 
You'll have to let us know what happens when the new batteries are installed. I've noticed that with watches, one of the signs of a dying battery is that the watch stops, then starts again and appears to keep time, then stops again. Sometimes the watch merely loses time. We also have a battery-operated wall clock at work which needs help in moving its second hand upward between 6 and 12 when the battery is wearing out. Sometimes the second hand just sticks in one place until one of us "helps" it along. (We've even, creepily enough, seen it move backward.) This causes the hour and minute hands to be slow.

I'm surprised that no one's posited yet that you might exist in some kind of strange time envelope. ;)
 
The 'new' batteries installed by the caretaker may have been bought at the same time (or earlier) as the original set and just left sitting in his toolbox for the intervening time.

As clocks have very low power consumption the difference in lifespan of a battery installed in a clock and one simply left in it's packaging to gradually discharge is probably negligible. Consequestly the battery installed may have also been flat.

Buy a new battery, with splenty time left before it's sell by date and see if it stops then.

The fact that they both went together is probably just coincidence - but as you changed the batteries at the same time it will probably happen again... When I moved into my house there wasn't a single working lightbulb in the whole place - I cahnged tham all, and found even since; all the regularly used ones 'go' within a few hours (or even minutes) of eachother.
 
Juding by the pictures, would I be right in saying that the clocks are of the same make? and therefore quite likely to have been bought at the same time.
Given that they have both worked fine up untill now and only then decide to go wonky together suggest that they are cheap-nasty-not very well made clocks that have a remarkably short operating life.

Or there is a fault common to that batch of clocks...


(raid the petty cash but two new ones and if they go wrong...... I go with the time envelope idea...... leave before you step outside work one day and find yourself in the 16th Century!!!:p
 
Update on the clocks. They are now working correctly. All it took was new batteries :D

I would still like to think it was a time warp though.
 
saultstar.com/webapp/sitepages/content.asp?contentID=70613&catname=Local+News
Link is dead. No archived version found.
 
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I used to have a watch that would stop if I took it off but start again when I put it back on again. One day I just laid it no my arm and it started again. I put this down to different temperatures, when it was cold it stopped, when it was warm it ran.

Does it get cold in the library during the night or certain times of the day?

Just a thought.
 
Okay more time upheavels this time involving watches which might be simialr to ds0rco's experience with watches.

I have two watches a digital one and one with hands. On Saturday morning the kids woke early and asked me what time it was. I told them 7:30 even though I had no idea what the time was, hoping that they would go back to bed. A couple of minutes later I looked at my watch with hands and it was indeed 7:32.

My kids kept pestering me and I grabbed my digital watch which read 8:32, exaclty one hour ahead of the other one. After being dragged out of bed I found that it was 8:32 and one of my watches lost an hour. It kept exactly one hour behind the other all day until I altered it.

This happens alot with this watch. It loses anything from 5 minutes to 3 hours overnight but NEVER when I am wearing it. Does it go into a time warp on my night stand or is it like ds0rco says, it is to do with temperature?

Incidentally the battery is okay. It has a 10 year battery life and is about 8 months into that 10 years.
 
I have had that happen with a battery operated clock. What I have found is that the hands will stick, and so stop moving, but, they will continue to try and move and eventually they will suceed and get unstuck, but the clock will be behind.
 
I thought about that one but for weeks on end the watch will run fine. It only loses time occassionally and only at night and only when I am not wearing it. All very odd and bizarre.
 
I had a load of promotional clocks to give out to customers once. they had a problem where at 7.40 as the two hands passed each other they would come into contact and scrape past each other. loseing an hour or so each time. so every morning the clocks where two hours slow.

my customers kept joking that our products must be cheap as well. all that was needed to slove problem was to bend the hands away from each other slightly.

7 years later i still see these clocks around and working fine.
 
You get that with cheap clocks though sometimes, especially if they don't have a glass/plastic cover over the face.

My watch will remain a mystery, incidentally it hasn't lost any time since saturday.
 
Battery-operated watches will lose time if placed next to a magnet or battery. Electromagnetic fields will cause them to slow down or stop dead until they are removed from the field. Some people believe that wearing two or more watches side by side will cause them all to slow down, but as I have 80 watches and wear four at a time, I can attest that this is not true for one particular Swiss watch brand. It may happen with cheaply-made watches.

(Before you think I'm crazy, I work for the Swiss watch company I have just mentioned above.)

Or, you may have a loose connection to the battery. Most of time two tiny contacts are all that connect the battery to the watch, so the slightest pressure or movement on a loose contact will cause it to touch or move away from the battery. I have seen watches which will not operate with a battery cover installed, but work fine with it off, even though I couldn't see any difference with the contacts.

It must be remembered that watch parts are very small, and the average quartz watch will have 80-100 parts. One loose piece and the whole thing fails to work properly. I'd suggest you bring your watch to the company for repair. Presumably it's under warranty.
 
I have to ask, why do you wear four watches at a time?

And the watch has been looked at and is fine. Just one of them things I guess.
 
My watch slipped back exactly 3 hours last night. Perhaps I have been in a timewarp again :D
 
At present I've got two clocks - one on my Mobile, and one on my CD player. These seem to have been slipping back and forth somewhat, so they're either about ten minutes fast or slow (I have reset them) and once or twice, have been an hour out. I can think of possible reasons for all of this; not paying enough attention when setting the time, etc, but it does seem to be coming ina bit of a flurry.
 
phi23 said:
Are the clocks by any chance radio controlled? I have the same problem where I work as I'm right down in the Mersey basin underneath the giant Stockport viaduct so we don't get a good signal. If the batteries are only half dead the clocks seem to have difficulty keeping the right time and end up exactly 4 hours slow in most cases.
Click to expand...

WHere do you work there? Actually, you probably won't want to answer that. I'm just curious as I am local (Hyde).

Elffriend, are you sure yo put the links to the clocks up? I can't see them and can't see any hidden code anywhere.
 
(I realise this is a very delayed response to a question which itself was asked even longer after the original post but thought I should respond anyway...)

I used to work at the Stagecoach offices close to the bus station under the viaduct. Haven't worked there for years now but I still live locally (Heaton Moor).
 
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