Equipment such as garden tractors, minidiggers, and so on, is often fitted with electronic hours counters these days.
How difficult are they to reset? I'm not about to move into a new field of crime: quite the opposite. I want to know whether, if I buy a secondhand machine, the counter could have been reset trivially easily, e.g. by disconnecting the machine's battery, or flipping a coin cell out of the counter? Or would it have needed real criminal intent?
I suspect the latter. However, just as you would with a car odometer, check the reading is commensurate with the condition of the machine.
Err it's a piece of your favourite cream and sponge confection. At the most basic a new hour meter can be installed for a few quid. Most roll over at a thousand hours anyway.
Electronic hour meters can be reset. The degree of difficulty depends upon the type of meter fitted [1]. Stand alone meters are tricky and it's cheaper to replace the unit. If the meter is part of the machines electronic display it requires a computer interface, the correct software and knowledge of the procedure. Getting it wrong can be very expensive.
[1] This came up in a conversation with an engineer from a major heavy plant supplier. He was carrying out some repairs to an excavator in our works.
Dirt cheap to replace I agree but only 3% of the hours meters from one industrial supplier roll over at 1000 hours. The vast majority are 100,000 hours or more and in my experience essentially non volatile and unresettable unless you want to start unpotting die on board packages hook up to unconnected bonding pads and determine the reset method.
All the hours meters on the equipment that I own is four or at most five digits with a tenth digit hence 999.9 or 9999.9 hours.
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