I set my truck clock ahead 3 minutes from my watch but I’m a couple weeks it’s 4-5 minutes ahead. Shouldn’t it just stay three minutes ahead?

807 views

I usually set my vehicle clock ahead too be early to places. I used to set it areas 5 mins but in a few weeks it’d be 7-8 minutes ahead.

In: Technology

7 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Short answer: Yes, your watch and your truck clock *should* stay perfectly together all the time. If they don’t, at least one of them is not keeping good time.

Longer answer: Almost all clocks are based on making something wiggle back and forth and counting how many times it wiggles. In an old-fashioned grandfather clock, the thing that wiggles–“oscillates” in technical terms–is the pendulum that you can see swinging. In a mechanical watch, there’s a tiny wheel inside that spins back and forth against a spring. In an electronic watch, there’s an even tinier quartz tuning fork.

The problem is that it’s very hard to make something that oscillates at *exactly the same* rate under *all conditions*. Changes in temperature, in particular, have been a pain in the butt for clockmakers for *centuries* and they still are.

I’m guessing your Garmin watch has a receiver that can pick up the time signal from GPS satellites. Those satellites have *very expensive* clocks on board which are *very accurate*. Your watch can use the signal from those space clocks to correct itself every day, so it doesn’t need to be able to keep perfect time on its own. It just has to stay “close enough” until it can check the GPS satellite again.

Your truck clock, on the other hand, is probably cheaply made. If so, then it might not be very accurate to begin with, and probably is vulnerable to temperature changes.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Should it be more accurate? I can’t say. 2 minutes in 3 weeks is not unusual for a car clock. That’s one second gained every 15,120 seconds or 1 in 4.2 hours. If my clock was that far out, I’d set it back 2 minutes so that in 3 weeks it will be on time and in 2 more weeks it will be 2 minutes ahead.

Anonymous 0 Comments

It would stay constant if the clock in the truck was accurate but it look like i run a bit fast.

A 2 minutes or 120s error in lest say 4 week is a error of 0.17s per hour or 1s per 5.6 hours. That is a error of 1s per 20160s an that is a lot.

A typical quartz wrist watch have a error 13s per 30 days so you are off by a factor of 10.

I suspects that the problem was the temperature but a regular quartz crystal slows down both when it is both to warm and to cold and yours is faster.

So you have a clock in the car that either have bad component from when it was build or one where part have failed overtime . So you for it to be accurate you need to replace the cock or what part that drives in if it is a new car with a lot of builtin electronics.

Anonymous 0 Comments

So, presuming your watch is functioning correctly, this is likely being caused by the clock/radio losing power, which in turn causes it to lose its ability to keep the time until it gets enough power to turn back on.

I’ve had this a lot with my truck because I was being stubborn about changing out the battery and instead just kept jumping it. And every time that I couldn’t get enough juice to start the truck, all my electronics would be off. My odometer would reset and my time would be off by however long it sat between the next jump and whenever it lost power.

So you may want to check your battery and see if its adequately charged (or if its just time to get it replaced). To my knowledge most clock/radios draw a small amount of charge from your battery to keep time accurately, so if the battery doesn’t have enough to even start the truck that may be the culprit.

And as an aside, I also would not be surprised if this could also be caused by the clock/radio just being old.

Anonymous 0 Comments

What kind of watch do you have? Self winding slow down over time unless put on a self winder overnight.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Have you traveled over 88 miles per hour in your truck at any point over those weeks?

Anonymous 0 Comments

Most commercially available clocks aren’t perfect at keeping time. This is obvious very quickly if your clock went by by one second for every two, or the reverse, but when it’s off by a hundredth or a thousandth of a second it will take some time to show up.

Your phone is linked to a system that gets it’s time keeping off of some of the most precise clocks out there. You average digital readout click in a vehicle has no such link and was manufactured by a low bidder with the cheapest possible materials. It’s not particularly surprising, then, when it turns out that it isn’t quite as exact as you might like, and will slowly start showing the wrong (or in your case, more wrong) time.

Also, your watch suffers from the same probl am as the vehicle clock. While it’s accurate enough for most purposes, it can be off enough that it’ll show over time.