Today our hydro power company released a statement: “We’ve heard from many customers asking why clocks skipped a few minutes this morning. This was due to our system balancing to match customer demand following a period of high frequency overnight. We want to reassure this wasn’t a result of system/equipment related issues.”
When I checked around the house my alarm , microwave and oven clocks were all 8-10 minutes ahead but my PC and Keurig coffee maker were fine. How can this system balancing change what time some clocks are displaying and why does it only affect certain devices?
In: 3
Many cheap clocks use the 60Hz frequency of mains AC as their clock tick (every sixty peaks they increment the clock 1 second). It sounds like they had some problems over night that increased this frequency above 60 Hz. This means that those clocks dependent upon the stable frequency actually ticked fast so they would be ahead of an actual clock.
Many clocks use GPS signals, radio broadcast time signals (q.v. [WWVB](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWVB)), or have their own oscillators. These would not have been affected by AC frequency since they do not rely upon it to count time.
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