Power cut

[Max Demian]

Lots of plug in electromechanical timeswitches are synchronous.

There must still be a lot of synchronous wall clocks around but I doubt many are sold. (Domestically they were always a nuisance because they needed a mains supply in an awkward place, i.e. halfway up a wall - before quartz clocks became available in the 70s there were battery clocks with balance wheels.)

Mains devices that are made for world markets can't be synchronous because of the different frequencies.

I have a Sony micro-hifi that is mains with a clock that must be quartz and gains about two minutes between DST changes. There are versions for different locales and voltages. Mine is 'European' and is 230V, 50/60Hz.

[Bob Eager]

MSF Anthorn for some years now.

[tabbypurr]

AFAIK just old ones do.

NT

[tabbypurr]

yes

not hard to solve.

Balance wheel clocks are appalling at time keeping. I have one, very stylish but I quit using it, cba to adjust it every day. Quite happy that daily chore is history.

NT

[The Natural Philosopher]

Yep. World went digital back in the 90's

A quartz clock is far more accurate than the mains over a short time period and if you want a longer one the use the Internet NTP service

Looking at the clock on the wall here which I set about a year ago it is about 30 seconds out from NTP

The kitchen one gets reset when I put a new battery in about every year. Oddly this one uses less battery. ???

[The Natural Philosopher]

One very simple reason. Cost.

A synchronous motor and gearbox costs more than a quartz crystal and a chip and a stepper motor. Or digital LCD display.

I dont think most people undersatnd engineering cost, but them most peole havent designed stuff to be mass produced and sold.

One of the big drivers for electric car windows is that a motor and gearbox and switch is a little bit cheaper than a handle.

Why do we have touch screens? Menus? because they are cheaper than proper controls.

Cost drives engineering development.

And in te comnsumert market, creeping featursim and novelty. Useless features are added that dont cost anything more than a bit of software, to make everything massively over complicated, which appeals to low brow users.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Ah. Katherine writes bloody good articles.

[Steve Walker]

Most mains clocks are digital these days and do time themselves from the mains. Built into ovens, cookers, boilers or just stand-alone bedside alarms. Wall and mantlepiece clocks tend to be battery powered and so are purely crystal based (although our wall clocks are good, old clockwork).

Most mains clocks are not run by synchronous motors now, they are LCD or LED and controlled by a single chip. However, the mains is there and it makes more sense to time from that (for the accuracy) and so they do.

Is it? Fair enough, but why did we have many years with cars only having electric windows as optional extras or only in the front?

Yes. Not just parts and production costs though. A big driver is that software is easy and "cheap" to add new features to or to provide different options for different trim levels of cars or levels of other consumer goods.

I am perfectly happy to have lots of extra features, as long as they don't get in the way of the basic, day-to-day operation - and too often they do.

SteveW

[Tim Streater]

AIHSB, w decided against a new Peugeot because they removed all heating controls and put it all on the touchscreen. Bloody dangerous if you don't have a passenger to do it.

And if SWMBO is wearing light coloured clothing on a sunny day, it reflects directly off her on the touchscreen, rendering same unusable.

[Martin Brown]

And potentially disastrous in some critical control situations like a warship throttle as the USA has found to its cost by pranging them:

I think part of the problem is that people who design GUIs seem to have absolutely no idea what the normal use profile will be so you end up with some frequently used bits far too well hidden.

Router menus are an example with bizarre convolutions of twisty little passages all alike worthy of Zork. Do not press this button again!

[Martin Brown]

But that was to be expected. There are industrial sites with their own small scale power generation that use the waste heat from their power plant too - it used to be more common when ICI was still going.

Looking again at that map and noting her observation that the north south transmission lines would be absolutely saturated at that peak usage time it struck me that transmission line effects might actually rebound at the Hornsea windfarm when one of the four main N-S circuits was broken to clear the fault and the instantaneous power in the grid had to be split across the remaining three main circuits.

I think it may have been sat on a hair trigger and gave up too easily. There is a hint in the official report that they "adjusted" things after the incident to make it more robust wrt transient ms line glitches. I find it depressing that the executive summary carefully ignored the timeline and frequency graph evidence in favour of anodyne prose.

They must have worked very hard on the form of words they use several times in the report. Do they think repeating it will make it true?

[The Other Mike]

It's not even remotely close to being overloaded with the loss of one circuit, 28GW national demand with depleted generation in the Midlands and North being quite normal this time of year. Loading is such that the loss of a double circuit, twice what happened, is well within the short term (at least 30 mins even in the highest ambient conditions) capabilities of the other circuits. The overhead line circuit was only lost for 20 seconds until auto reclosing.

Hornsea might have seen some minor disturbance but the generator / power park module protection should never be set such that it is reaching or sensitive to a line fault over 100 miles, two/three lines and at least three/four HV substations away.

A scenario of two near simultaneous lightning strikes should not be discounted.

The timestamps are accurate within the limitations of MSF or if it were free running the crystal in an oven in the site radioclock

It's an interim report, it's the best you and OFGEM get to see at the moment.

[Martin Brown]

Even today - although LCD ones with tortuous interfaces are available.

Increasingly radio synchronised battery powered "atomic" clocks have become popular. No need to set them as they self set - though some of mine from Aldi/Lidl default to Berlin, Germany when power cycled.

They can with a near trivial change to the gear ratio 6:1 vs 5:1. Almost all synchronous clock motors drive a gear train to get 1 rev/minute out.

The batches made for different markets get different gearboxes.

US makers had the temerity to flog a 240v version of US mains razors that rely on a 60Hz mechanical resonance in the UK (especially at Xmas). They were utter crap!

You can trim a quartz crystal to be under 1ppm in a house which is ~30s in a year but the default stock item is typically good to 15s/month.

[newshound]

+1

Such a pleasure to find someone who knows which way is "up" :-)

[Max Demian]

Depends on the design as how it is regulated. Ships' chronometers (or "watches" as they were called initially) used balance wheels and determined the longitude very well.

[The Natural Philosopher]

A crystal costs next to nothing. Why would they use mains?It will end up costing more

Manufcturers stuck in teh age of te dinosaur/EU

Exactly.

I simply cant be arsed to learn how to set a modern microwave fpr '3 mintes at half power please' when its all buttons and menus,

Its 1 second on two rotary dials here.

Commercial microwaves have knobs

The prize for the worst user interface in te workld gose to smart phones

I missed about 30 calls before I worked out how to answer it

What ever happened to 'lift handset and talk'

[The Natural Philosopher]

Peugot is french for unpolished turd anyway.

[Martin Brown]

They don't have to be - if the balance wheel is temperature compensated.

I have a 400 day mechanical clock with thermal compensation on its torsion pendulum. It keeps time almost as well as a quartz clock provided that the ambient temperature doesn't change by too much. I only have to tweak it seasonally for it to keep near perfect time.

Temperature compensation, choice of escapement and jewel bearings make all the difference. Ships chronometers of old were extremely well made and insanely expensive objects when new. They still fetch a decent price today but nothing like what they used to cost in real terms.

[Tim+]

Good move. I got rid of my Jaguar for similar reasons. Touch screens are a seriously bad idea in cars if they are intended for the driver to use. I think they?ll go the way of mobile phones before long once folk wake up to how dangerous they are when driving.

Tim

[jeikppkywk]

Not viable with a mobile phone.