Back in the 1970s I had a cheap Russian made Sekonda which would be off by a minute or so every few days, which was fine with me then. Currently I have a Traser H3 which loses about a second a week. Consequently I now get uncomfortable when it is off by just a few seconds so I set it 5 seconds fast every couple of months. Recently however, I bought a ridiculously cheap Casio F-91W for ~ $10 because i need to send the Traser off for its 5-yearly battery change and I don’t like not having a watch. This is astoundingly accurate to within a second a month! Will I ever be able to go back to the +/- 5 seconds of the Traser?
How often do you check the time of your watch, and how far off do you let it drift?
I have a collection of over 35 watches so the mechanicals run down and stop frequently because I just don’t feel like winding them every other day and it doesn’t hurt them to stop for a week or two.
I change watches almost every day so I end up winding and setting my watch pretty much every weekday - I don’t mind at all, it’s part of the fun for me.
I terms of accuracy all my mechanicals are within 7 seconds a day or less which is perfectly fine for my needs. I do have one quartz that is accurate to 5 seconds a year and was at one time the worlds most accurate watch that didn’t have any external communication, but now Citizen has made one accurate to one second a year.
I check fairly often, as I normally have something to do every top of the hour at the office. If I notice it’s off more than a couple of minutes I’ll reset it, but that doesn’t happen but every few months. This is just a cheap $30 analog watch I bought off amazon.
I don’t wear a wristwatch but I have five digital timers that do double duty as [home] device controllers. All are programmable and setting time to the second is available. Like DCnDC I want these things to be spot on so I manually reset them to a master clock once a month.
When I first started timers would be replaced if off by more than a minute each month. Not being satisifed, now I’m down to 15 seconds per month. Someday someone will offer these things with a GPS synchronizer and be affordable too. I win that day.
The Citizen versions that use the NIST radio signal to calibrate themselves are pretty neat. Mine works and even w/o it, is quite precise. I have a Divers watch from them that maybe gains a few seconds a month, as compared to the daily-calibrated watch. Eco-drive, 200 m water resistant, not terribly expensive (I think I paid something like 150 for it): does everything i want a mechanical bracelet watch to do. A little clunky for evening wear, but fine with a suit.
The divers watch is quite nice, but a good deal bigger. And if they’re going to have a rotating bezel—which I use a lot more than I thought I would—it really needs to be lockable. Which mine doesn’t.
I started wearing a wristwatch again this Christmas, after a several years of not wearing one. It’s a hybrid smartwatch though, so it’s practically always in perfect sync.
An error of up to 15 seconds would be entirely acceptable to me, 15 to 30 is borderline, and over 30 seconds is unacceptable. With past cheap watches, I’ve sometimes had to adjusted the time weekly or monthly to keep it in the acceptable range, but my current watch is so accurate it never comes close to being 15 seconds off.
I have a quartz Invicta. I check the time against the NIST clock seven times a year. I have to fiddle with it anyway to adjust the date at the end of months with less than 31 days. On those occasions, I usually take the opportunity to reset it to the correct time, but it isn’t really necessary. I also reset it at the beginning and end of daylight saving time. I reset it today after almost 8 weeks, and it was only off by 4 seconds.
The only time I REALLY cared was when I commuted via train. I made damned sure my watch was set to TRAIN time - made no difference to me whether that corresponded w/ GMT or anything else. You only need to have those doors close in your face once…
Nowadays, within a couple of minutes is fine. I’m almost always early, and it seems most things wait for latecomers anyway. Time and temp are a couple of things in which I figure close is good enough.
I don’t care if the seconds match the official seconds. As long as the drift on a wristwatch is under one minute, I’m all right. Since we change/readjust the time twice a year with the longest interval being about 8 months, that means I could live with about 80 seconds of drift per year.
We have a mantle clock from the 1930s in the living room, it can gain or lose up to 3 minutes between the weekly windings (depending on the temperature, I think); right now it rings 3 minutes early. I’m surviving.
You have a rare F-91W. I have four of them and they typically vary from 5 seconds per month to 22 seconds per month. What bugs me is that they are consistent. Take the model that gains 22 seconds per month. If I could pause the watch by 28 milliseconds every hour, it would have been within two seconds of the correct time for the past 15 months.
I currently wear the one that gains 5 seconds per month and reset it every two weeks. When the error get above 10 seconds per month, I usually buy a new one. They are inexpensive and lightweight (21 grams).
I also have a Bulova Precisionist which is allegedly accurate to 10 seconds per year. The first year, it gained 8 seconds. The second year, it gained 14. I would wear it more often, but it weighs three times as much as the Casio and doesn’t have a stopwatch capability.
I’ve been retired for the last ten years, but I used to set the watch by the school bells where I taught. I always wore cheap digital ones and they seemed to keep to the bell for a whole school year. Now I really don’t care. A few minutes off don’t matter. In the spirit of this thread, however, I have set my <$9 Walmart watch to the time on my PC screen and will try to remember to check it a few times over the next few days. I promise to try to remember to update this thread later, so everybody now has that to look forward to!
Every watch or clock we own that can be set manually is always about 5 min. fast. For us, arriving anywhere “on time” for anything is late. Drives our kids nuts.
I only use wristwatches for running, so anything that isn’t wildly inaccurate to the tune of a minute or so per hour will be acceptable. I don’t even set mine. The only thing it would be good for would be to let me know if certain places on the way were open, and I can do the math in my head because I knew when I left.
My car clock on the other hand is true to minutes within a year and I find that acceptable: I reset the time when I adjust it for Daylight Savings. My home clock gets unplugged often enough that I don’t worry about how accurate it is as long as it’s too fast rather than too slow.
(I still have electric clocks rather than gadgets because I find it cumbersome to always have a device on you, especially when you’re running.)
I have a Casio 530A which uses the NIST signal to reset itself every night. Fine except when I was in Finland where it did it in the middle of the afternoon. It is also powered with a solar cell, and has not needed a battery or winding for over a decade.
So, very accurate with no effort on my part.