![]() Too often I-not the salesperson-was the one to explain to the customer that their watch needed light to keep the storage capacitor charged. The customer is keeping the watch in a place where it won’t remain charged, the customer will be back with the same problem even after the replacement of the capacitor if you don’t explain how to care for these watches. In our experience, seven out of 10 need only the storage capacitor charged.ĭo yourself and your customers a favor and try recharging the capacitor before going through the process of sending the watch to your watchmaker. If after 10 minutes it is still tripping, the watch will in fact need the storage capacitor replaced. The first thing we do is put a Kinetic on the watch winder to recharge the capacitor or an Eco-Drive or other solar watch under an incandescent light bulb for a few hours (mine is a 40-watt LED that is as bright as a 100-watt incandescent light.)Īn Eco-Drive/solar watch will be fully charged in about four hours. Often, we receive these types of watches for repair with the instruction for a new storage capacitor. ![]() What is meant by “trip” is that the second hand will skip two seconds for every second it ticks. With that said, you can see why a jewelry box or underwear drawer is not the optimum place to keep this type of watch.Įco-Drive/solar watches, on the other hand, generate power from ambient light in order to recharge their storage capacitors.Īll solar, Kinetic and Eco-Drive watches have a symptom that lets you know when the storage capacitor needs to be charged-the second hand begins to trip. Replacing a storage capacitor is much more costly than replacing a simple watch battery. ![]() Like all rechargeable batteries, if we run the battery down too often and do not fully charge the storage capacitor it will fail prematurely. Storage capacitors act like a battery however, they can be recharged. Regular watch batteries cannot be recharged. In a Kinetic watch, the motion charges the storage capacitor. In an automatic watch, this motion winds the mainspring. Kinetic watches act like automatic watches in that it is the motion of the arm while wearing the watch that powers the watch. This is evidenced by their telling you that the watch was running when they put in the jewelry box or in their underwear drawer. It seems to me that the end user customers have no idea how their watch generates power. I know for some of you the headline of this story might seem weird but having repaired Citizen Eco-Drive and Seiko Kinetic watches for a long time now, I can tell you that there are things that need to be covered.
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