ETA 2824 Power Reserve Test

[kwiteaboy]

I have four watches with the ETA 2824 in them now, so I decided to do a power reserve test on the three of them to see how much variation there was within the movement. I wound each of them 40 turns of the crown from a dead stop, set them to midnight, and let them run down. The variation surprised me:

Steinhart Ocean Black DLC (-5 sec/day) - 37 hours
Halios Laguna (-10 sec/day) - 41.5 hours
Halios Puck (-10-15 sec/day) - 25 hours

The parentheticals are the typical accuracy of each watch when being worn for a day. None of the watches had been worn in a few days.

Is this much variation surprising to anyone? The Laguna running that long was interesting, but the fact that the Puck only made it a little more than a day was shocking. I'm going to re-run the test again tonight so I can have averages. It would be neat if people with these and other 2824s could do the same test, so we could gather the data to establish a distribution of power reserves for this movement.

[Eric L.]

Might want to try again with the Puck. 25hrs is far too short.

[i1800collect]

Are you sure you did 40 complete/full turns of the crown on each of those watches before setting the time and conducting your test? I ask because due to variations in each of the crown's diameters, how comfortable each watch is to wind, and a myriad of other factors could possibly have resulted in you doing 40 "turning actions" on the crown with your fingers but not actually winding each movement completely or equally.

If you did, you should probably get the 2824-2 in your Puck checked out.

[kwiteaboy]

I just started another trial trying to standardize the extraneous factors, so we'll see what the results are there. Hopefully the Puck's time was user error, but we'll see in about two days!

[tk1971]

On my ETA's there is a slight clicking that can be heard when the watch is fully wound. Also, you didn't mention how old each of your watches were and how often they are worn. Were the variations due to various states of wear/maintenance of each movement?

[kwiteaboy]

The Ocean was purchased in December 2011, the Laguna in January 2012, and the Puck in February 2012. As far as differences in wearing, the Puck is worn by far the most often (3-4 days a week since I received it) and the Ocean the least (less than once a week since I received it) with the Laguna somewhere between those. The variations may be due to wear. I intend to do several trials of this over the next few weeks to get some robust averages and hopefully achieve some versimilitude in the actual power reserves of the movements in these watches.

[primerak]

Although within acceptable range I would be annoyed by all three in your rotation running slow particularly the Puck at -10/15 - I prefer my auto's to run fast if anything. Well keep us posted on the PR testing.

I have four watches with the ETA 2824 in them now, so I decided to do a power reserve test on the three of them to see how much variation there was within the movement. I wound each of them 40 turns of the crown from a dead stop, set them to midnight, and let them run down. The variation surprised me:

Steinhart Ocean Black DLC (-5 sec/day) - 37 hours
Halios Laguna (-10 sec/day) - 41.5 hours
Halios Puck (-10-15 sec/day) - 25 hours

The parentheticals are the typical accuracy of each watch when being worn for a day. None of the watches had been worn in a few days.

Is this much variation surprising to anyone? The Laguna running that long was interesting, but the fact that the Puck only made it a little more than a day was shocking. I'm going to re-run the test again tonight so I can have averages. It would be neat if people with these and other 2824s could do the same test, so we could gather the data to establish a distribution of power reserves for this movement.

[kwiteaboy]

I would also prefer them to run fast - interestingly, none of my four 2824s has ever had a day where they ran fast. Each has had days where it was +/- 0, but if they're off, they're always slow. In contrast, my Valjoux 7750 has only ever run dead on or fast.

[bakuma]

That's weird about the Halios. I've always gotten more than 40 hrs. from new 2824s with no timekeeping issues (I've made several tests over the years). The few which exhibited poor power reserves were, with one exception, movements in used watches that were probably in need of service anyway (the exception exhibited a nice long PR following service).

[lysanderxiii]

25 hours is not in the acceptable range......