Cheap alarm clock

[sligoNoSPAMjoe]

I don't know how they handle their distribution. I would think that the problem you are pointing out would explain why they often seem to be a time zone or so off.

[Ed Pawlowski]

We have an "atomic clock" at work. It is often off by an hour and right now it is set for a different time zone so it appears correct. When we go to DST, who knows what will happen. It has been stable for a couple of months now, but at times it would make an adjustment and come back an hour off.

[Nate Nagel]

My "Sharp" brand "atomic" alarm clock from Target has been flawless since new. Only issues I have with it are short battery life (it's powered solely by batteries, have to replace them every couple months because the display gets hard to read at night) and not very loud alarm beep. But I can't use an AC powered alarm clock unless the alarm works when the power is off, and while some may work like that, it's hard to find documentation that it will in fact function.

nate

[Nate Nagel]

Forgot to mention, one more quibble. The clock I have uses a battery powered outdoor temp sensor, and apparently supports three of them. I'd love to have extra temp sensors so I could monitor temp in the attic, garage, whatever, but who knows where to buy them. I suspect that it was probably a relabel of someone else's product, but whose?

nate

[willshak]

on 2/22/2009 11:17 AM (ET) Ed Pawlowski wrote the following:

Now, if they will make all time keepers with an atomic time feature, maybe I won't have to go all around the house resetting appliance clocks after a power outage. :-)

[gfretwell]

A lot of them use a garden variety LM134. This ends up being very linear across a wide range of temperatures. (unlike thermocouples and thermistors)

[BillGill]

I have a couple of "Sharp" brand wall clocks. They have good battery life, but of course they don't have digital displays and alarms. One of them keeps good time, almost, right through the DST change. The other one doesn't. The first one I bought apparently uses the DST flag on the time signal. However, it has a quirk that in the morning after a change it will be right, then in the evening it will go back to the other time. Then the next morning it will be right again and will stay that way till the next time change. The second one I bought of the same brand and model has the DST change hard coded, so it is off an hour during the interim between the new time change and the old one. I do usually set the time zone to compensate, but people in Eastern and Pacific time zones just have to lump it I guess.

Bill

[sligoNoSPAMjoe]

Yea many of them were/are poorly programmed. Part of the problem was the change in DST that was recently made.