Just goes to show...

[Caraptor]

...that when it comes to non-thermocompensated quartz, you never know when you're picking a winner or a loser.

I decided to nerd-up and conduct a long term accuracy test of four reqular quartz watches I have. I set all three of them to time.gov 102 days ago, and today I used the stopwatch method to check how much they had deviated. I then took that error rate and divided it by 102 days to give me an average daily error rate. Then I multipled that number by 365 to give me a yearly error rate.

The results were surprising.

4th Place: Timex Ironman: -75.14 seconds per year

3rd Place: Seiko SNA611: -46.7 seconds per year

2nd Place: Citizen BN0000-04h: -5.99 seconds per year

1st Place: Timex Expedition Rugged Field: -1.8 seconds per year!

-1.8 seconds per year?????? Go Timex!!

[Dr. Robert]

Very cool.....Timex, takes a licking, keeps on ticking.....and precisely!

[Sodiac]

I have 2 Timex quartz watches that I wear maybe once a year. I last set them some time last summer. Just by coincidence I checked today, one is +6 and the other -17. That's seconds! Both beat my Lum-Tec and Casios big time.

[Caraptor]

I really like those, Sodiac.

[Caraptor]

Now before you guys start giving the guys over at the HAQ forum a hard time, understand that you could test 20 different Timex Expeditions and get wildly different results. I just happen to be lucky with what I've got. (But I am happy to know that both my Citizen diver and my Timex Expedition fall well within HAQ timing standards. On top of that, I rarely ever wear the Timex. I wonder how it would be if I wore it more?

[brandon\]

^ I was just about to ask how often you wore each of those watches... did you wear them roughly equal amounts of time?

And I do like the results for the BN0000-04H.

[jilgiljongiljing]

Does wearing quartz make much of a difference at all, was it part of your test to see if something sitting by itself for majority of the period vs something you wore really frequently? Best thing I have is a Casio Waveceptor that syncs to atomic time, great reference. It was less than 20 bucks. Sometimes it really shows you the hobby is about passion and not just time keeping.

[Caraptor]

^ I was just about to ask how often you wore each of those watches... did you wear them roughly equal amounts of time?

And I do like the results for the BN0000-04H.

The SNA611 gets the most wear time as it is my current work watch. It gets worn about 10 hours per day M-F.

The Ironman is worn every other day for about 20 minutes.

The BN0000-04H is worn almost every week day for about 4 hours and almost every weekend for the whole day.

The Timex Expedition is rarely worn. Maybe a few hours per every 2 months.

[Caraptor]

Does wearing quartz make much of a difference at all, was it part of your test to see if something sitting by itself for majority of the period vs something you wore really frequently? Best thing I have is a Casio Waveceptor that syncs to atomic time, great reference. It was less than 20 bucks. Sometimes it really shows you the hobby is about passion and not just time keeping.

Yes, wearing a quartz watch makes a difference as quartz movements are temperature sensitive--thus the use of thermocompensation to correct for temperature variations.