The one in my car runs slow and the one at work(plugged in) runs fast. My oven and microwave seem to stay accurate. Why do we have bad clocks?
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Poor engineering or bad quality control. It could be either. The bad quality control is pretty obvious. If a certain component is out of spec, then obviously the system could behave out of spec as well.
Bad engineering. Maybe its a new electronics engineer that didn’t properly take into account thermal characteristics and is throwing the crystal oscillator out of wack. Or maybe they aren’t seperating analog and digital grounds properly and its causing unexpected behavior in the system. It could be any problem, but those are just some examples of engineers not taking into account parameters that affect the system.
Time is relative to the observer.
Time actually transpires at different speeds depending on whether the observer (clock) is in outer space, at the center of the earth, or on the planet’s surface.
The closer you gat to a center of mass, the slower time goes and the faster you move, the slower time goes.
A clock in motion will run slower than a clock that sits still.
That said, somebody is probably messing with the clock at work so that the work day will end early, and the one in your car gets a power surge every time you turn it on, which may effect the rate at which it runs.
Because you’re not paying for good clocks
Your oven is likely set off the line frequency and there are daily adjustments to that specifically to keep clocks in alignment
But for smaller electronics, its just not worth it to put in a high accuracy crystal. Would you pay an extra $10 for a plug in clock that only drifts by seconds per year? Probably not
Everything has tolerances. You can get more expensive things that have tighter tolerances but nothing is ever actually perfect
A clock that is 0.1% accurate loses 1.44 minutes per day, its not good but it is cheap. A calibrated 0.0001% accurate clock(1 ppm) only loses 30 seconds per year but requires several dollars in hardware and calibration during production.
Like most things, if you’re asking “Why does the thing i bought kinda suck”, its almost always because you and most other people are unwilling to pay significantly more for the version that doesn’t suck
Because it’s a cheap clock. The clock doesn’t have to be all that accurate. It isn’t installed in a GPS satellite it’s just your oven. If it’s a little off it isn’t going to affect anything important.
It’s good enough for how much it costs. You can get very accurate quartz clocks, ones which compensate for the resonator changing frequency with temperature, ones which sync up with atomic clocks by radio, but those cost more and most people don’t need or want that kind of precision.
There are watches which autocorrect its time by special broadcast. New lines of Casio are able to synchronise its time with your phone. And almost all smart watches do the same.
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