Electric clocks in the area of "Blind River" are continually jumping ten minutes ahead on their own.
Posts: 351 | From: Fairbanks, AK | Registered: Mar 2004
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quote:Daffyd Roderick, Hydro's media spokesman, said the events "were very unusual."
"It isn't a problem we've encountered in the past," Rodderick said. "There may be something else going on here. But something affecting only clocks is highly unlikely to be hydro."
Rodderick said if there is some kind of voltage fluctuation, normally that should burn a digital clock because of the sudden surge in power. But that's not happening, which is one reason why Hydro One doesn't believe hydro is causing the time jumps.
First of all, wouldn't a power company know whether there had been voltage fluctuations in the previous week?
In any event, this reminds me a bit of a problem that residents of Los Angeles seem to have faced in 1936. (Emphasis mine, below).
quote:The city of Los Angeles had gotten into electric power generation early. By 1936, the city was serving three hundred thousand customers with 50-Hertz AC current.
But Hoover Dam, with its 60 Hertz output, was just being finished. Los Angeles would have to switch over. That made little difference with most early electrical appliances. But the expensive new electrical clocks would now gain twelve minutes every hour.
So Los Angeles set up clock-conversion centers. Bring in your fancy clock, and five days later it'd come back with new gears. Retrofitting was phased in over eighteen months. Even then, 55,000 unfixable clocks had to be dumped into Los Angeles Harbor.
Now, I'm not mechanically or electronically oriented at all, but it seems to me that a very slight and sustained increase (like 0.6%) in power frequency -- such that could account for speeding time up by ten minutes over a 24-hour period -- likely wouldn't adversely affect the operation of other electronic devices on the grid. Or am I wrong?
Bonnie "ticked off" Taylor
-------------------- Se non è vero, è ben trovato. Posts: -99014 | From: Chapel Hill, North Carolina | Registered: Feb 2000
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quote:At the heart of the [digital] clock there is a piece that can generate an accurate 60-hertz (Hz, oscillations per second) signal. There are two ways to generate this signal:
The signal can be extracted from the 60-Hz oscillations in a normal power line. Many clocks that get their power from a wall socket use this technique because it is cheap and easy. The 60-Hz signal on the power line is reasonably accurate for this purpose.
[Skip method #2 and the rest of the explanation]
Seems to me if the line frequency were pulsing a bit high (and it wouldn't take much), a digital clock reliant on that signal could "run" a little fast.
Bonnie "my brain hertz" Taylor
-------------------- Se non è vero, è ben trovato. Posts: -99014 | From: Chapel Hill, North Carolina | Registered: Feb 2000
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CD
The Red and the Green Stamps
posted
Why were they dumping clocks into a harbor?
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quote:BLIND RIVER — This may read like an X Files story, but something in the Blind River area is moving electrically powered clocks ahead by 10 minutes. Hydro One is not only surprised but stumped.
[...]
A call to Hydro One only deepened the mystery.
Daffyd Roderick, Hydro's media spokesman, said the events "were very unusual."
[...]
Engineers Rodderick checked with at Hydro One are stymied but Rodderick said he planned to keep looking into the matter.
Surprised? Stumped? Stymied? You'd think that someone at Hydro One would've known that
quote:[o]ne wide-spread complaint of electric utility customers is that their digital clocks run fast. At first a mystery, the direct reason for these fast-running clocks has been solved by troubleshooters in the field and in the laboratory.
I'm not sure who I blame more, the reporter or the power company spokesman, for not minimizing the "mystery" element in the Blind River piece. Worldwide problems with fast-running and slow-running digital clocks aren't new.
quote:Why were they dumping clocks into a harbor?
So they could at least tell maritime?
Bonnie "still waters run fast" Taylor
-------------------- Se non è vero, è ben trovato. Posts: -99014 | From: Chapel Hill, North Carolina | Registered: Feb 2000
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