posted
For quite a while, probably over a month, the clock in our kitchen has had a dying battery. The second hand quivered around the 37 minute mark, not having enough power to make it up to the top of the circle. As I said, it did this for a quite a while. We both knew the battery was gone. We would need to replace it. But being that the microwave had a clock, it wasn't high on the list of priorities.
Several days ago, we noticed that the time on the clock was in a different position. Closer inspection showed that the second hand was now ticking normally around the clock. The first time I saw it, I thought that my husband had changed the battery--although I thought it was odd that he hadn't set the correct time. A day or so later, I asked him about it. He thought I had done it. I hadn't. Neither of us touched that clock. Last night, as an expirement to see if it was keeping correct time, I set the clock. This morning, it was still the right time. It had kept time perfectly.
We're pretty freaked out. Has anyone EVER heard of a battery spontaneously working again?! We live in an apartment, and the apartments' main office has a key... would they come in, see our messy apartment and decide to change a battery? Did a thief break in, take pity on us, and change the battery for us rather than steal something?
posted
You've probably got a funky connection somewhere in the clock. I'm not convinced the battery was ever dead in the first place.
Posts: 1660 | Registered: Jan 2000
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posted
How has the weather been where you are? Because, as I am sure you know, heat is a form of energy. And if there was a shift in temperature from hot to cool to hot to cool (perhaps you are turning on the air conditioning when you come home? Or your kitchen is heating up when you are running the oven?), the battery (which, I am sure you know, is an energy storage device), may be absorbing the heat in the room (via heat conduction, radiation, and convection, and the law of enthalpy) and storing it, releasing it when the temperature is cooler, so that it is being recharged through the change in potential energy as represented by the change in temperature gradient.
(Shvester Esther's science fiction account of how clock batteries work)
Posts: 10397 | Registered: Jun 2005
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posted
Are you sure the battery was dying? Perhaps the hand or the driving gear was slightly misshapen, and the kink's worked itself out.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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