Category Archives: technology

Replacing a Seiko Kinetic Watch Battery

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I’ve owned a Seiko Kinetic model 5M62 watch for about 8 years and I really liked the fact that it never needed batteries and would run for days without winding. The Kinetic watch is self-winding, and instead of using a spring to store the energy, it converts the mechanical motion into electricity and stores it instead. This gives it the convenience of a self-winding watch along with the accuracy of a quartz movement. However, a few weeks ago I noticed that it would stop running if I took it off for a few hours. Sometimes, when I was just typing on the computer and not moving my wrist around, it would stop running. Below is a picture of the watch.

Seiko Model 5M62

I figured there was something wrong with the energy storage system, possibly a dead battery or bad capacitor. After a web search, I found out that the watch does have a battery, which is sometimes referred to as a capacitor, but it is indeed a battery. All rechargeable batteries eventually lose their ability to hold a charge and after 8 years, this one had simply worn out. The problem with changing it is that the Seiko Kinetic battery is not one of those standard watch batteries that you buy in a store and easily change by yourself. However, I found that it could be purchased from vendors on Ebay or other on-line websites like Swatchbattery.com for around $20.

In our disposable society, I’m sure this issue could have been an excuse to go shopping for a new watch. But once you become attached to a watch, and this one is water proof so I hardly ever take it off, it sort of becomes a part of you. I hated the thought of replacing it, especially because I felt it had many more years of service.

I started reading a few of the websites that talked about replacing the battery as a DIY project, but wasn’t sure if I was up to the task or had the necessary tools. I never had taken the watch apart and looking at the back of it, I didn’t think it would simply pop off like my previous watches that had user-replaceable batteries. I talked with the jeweler where I bought it and they told me that they would have to send it away for repair and thought it might cost $65 or more to replace the battery. The local jewelery repair shop had a similar assessment. So, being an adventurer and inveterate fixer, I decided to do it myself.

You can see from the image below that the watch had notches on the back of its case. This meant that it needed a special case opener wrench.

Watch with notches requiring a watch wrench

I decided to get a Jaxa style opener (shown below) which clamps down on three notches since it seemed like it would do the job better than the openers that only grabbed the case on two notches. These can be found on the Internet or at Harbor Freight for less than $10.

Seiko watch case wrench

To make things easier, I decided to remove the watch band. Most of the watches I’ve owned had spring-loaded pins that were pretty easy to remove, but this model had pins pressed in that held the watch band in place. I was able to push them out with the tool shown below.

removing the pins from the Seiko watch band

I used a paper towel to protect the watch and gently gripped it in a vice and was able to unscrew the back with the watch opener. It took a fair amount of torque to loosen the case back. In the image below you can see what it looks like inside. The battery is the brass-colored part in upper side of the image below. To get to it, you need to remove three very small screws. I had several small jeweler’s screw drivers around the house, but these screw slots are so tiny that I found it necessary to use a file on one of my screw drivers to make a very sharp tip in order for it to fit in the slots of these screws.

inside view of Seiko Model 5M62

The center screw holds the winding weight and gear in place. These items can only go one one way as the shaft is keyed. Actually, they can go on two ways, but both ways are correct. However, you can put them in upside down, so pay attention to how they are installed as you remove them. The gear must mate up with a smaller gear so make sure that it does before installing the winding weight and screw.

removing seiko watch rewiding weight

When you get all the parts out, they look like the image below. There are 3 small screws, the winding weight, a gear, a red mylar insulator, a battery hold-down clamp, and the battery. To re-assemble them, just (carefully) put them back together they same way you took them apart. You’ll find a pair of sharp tweezers useful to handle the screws and other parts.

disassembled view of seiko 5M62 watch battery

Here is the package I got from an online retailer. It came with a red mylar insulator, a hold-down bracket, and the Maxcell TC920S battery.

Seiko 3023-5MZ replacement battery

In addition to the tools mentioned above, I also used the magnifying headset shown below which I highly recommend. I think that the magnifying headset (with built-in LED lights) was instrumental in allowing me to work on such a small device. They can also be found on the Internet for less than $10.

lighted magnifying headset

If you’ve stuck with me this long, I’m going to give you a bonus. I mentioned that I had owned the watch for 8 years so now I have a confession. I always wondered what the push-button at the 2-o’clock position was used for. Sometimes it would advance the second hand 5, 10, 20, or 30 seconds and then it would sit there and stop. Then it would start running after the time had caught up with it. I had no idea why it did this because I had never read the owner’s manual and don’t even know if I still have a copy of it. So, in case you’re wondering, here is a copy of the page from the owner’s manual I found online that explains it (hint: it’s a sort of ‘gas gauge’ for the battery):

Seiko reserve indicator explanation

Incidentally, when the watch battery had begun to fail, it was impossible to get the reserve indicator to advance the second hand more than 5 or 10 seconds even after vigorous winding. Now with the fresh battery, it jumps forward 30 seconds whenever I push it.

Would you like to know how to correctly wind the watch and how much it takes to keep it moving for a day? If so, here is the explanation, again from the Seiko manual:

winding a seiko kinetic watch

It would appear that if you walk more than 720 meters (about 1/2 mile) you’ll impart enough energy to keep it going for a two days. Here’s another interesting tidbit: If you see the watch second hand jumping 2 seconds at a time, that means the battery is low and that you have less than 24 hours of charge left on it.

So, there you have it, a way to resurrect a watch that should last for decades. If you have one of these Seiko Kinetic watches sitting in a drawer gathering dust because of a dead battery, I hope my explanation gives you the motivation to get it working again for minimal cost. Please feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions or just want to share your experience with other readers.

Does it seem like too much trouble or beyond your skill level to do this repair? If so, you may want to get in touch with John Safranek at KineticRepair.com in Denton, TX or call him at 940-239-9888. He’s a Seiko Kinetic expert and performs these battery changes starting at just $49.95.

Energy Saver 3000 and other PFC nonsense

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My friend Jack recently asked me to write about the Energy Saver 3000 and whether it will save money on your electricity bill. I saw this product advertised on TV about a year ago and nearly fell out of my chair when I heard the ridiculous claims being made about saving money using a power factor correction device. And I understand other charlatans have jumped on the bandwagon and have begun offering similar devices that are supposed to ‘pay for themselves in a few months’ with the money you will save on your electricity bill.

Few people understand what power factor means and I guess this makes it an ideal way to extract money from consumers who trust that anything that appears on a TV ad must be legitimate. Basically, the power factor is an indication of phase alignment of the voltage and current in an AC waveform. In a purely resistive load, the alignment is perfect, which gives it a power factor of 1. On loads that have energy storage elements in them like inductors and capacitors, it can get out of alignment and the power factor falls below 1. A power factor below 1 doesn’t mean that all the energy is getting lost, it’s just that a portion of it is being returned to its source. Whenever energy is transmitted through wires a small amount of it is lost in the resistance of the wires, so it’s preferable to minimize the amount that gets returned. The power company has a vested interest in keeping the power factor as close to 1 as possible for the same reason. However, unless you’re a commercial customer, you don’t get charged for power that is returning to its source. You only get charged for actual power consumed. And in the grand scheme of things, the amount being returned is rather small as a percentage of the overall total, less than 10% for the average household. Since about 7% of all power is lost in the power company’s transmission lines, the overall loss due to having an imperfect power factor is 10% x 7% = .7%. This means that if every household in the nation were to have a PFC device (one that actually worked) the maximum potential energy savings is .7%.

You can improve the power factor of an inductive load such as a motor by adding a properly sized capacitor to it. This is what these power factor correction devices claim to do. But the problem is that they can’t match the capacitance to the load because most of these motors run only intermittently and so when they are not running, the capacitor will cause the power factor to become out of phase in the opposite direction. And none of these devices has active monitoring to switch the capacitor in and out. That is why these devices simply cannot save energy. Even if they did actively monitor and correct the power factor, the savings would be nowhere near what they claim since, as mentioned, the average savings would only approach .7%.

The Energy Star website has an interesting entry on these devices:

“ENERGY STAR does not qualify any Power Factor Correction Devices. Please send us an email at logomisuse@energystar.gov if you see one that claims to be ENERGY STAR certified.

Power Factor Correction Devices claim to reduce residential energy bills and to prolong the productive life cycles of motors and appliances by reducing the reactive power (kVAR) that is needed from the electric utility.

We have not seen any data that proves these types of products for residential use accomplish what they claim. Power factor correction devices improve power quality but do not generally improve energy efficiency (meaning they won’t reduce your energy bill). There are several reasons why their energy efficiency claims could be exaggerated. First, residential customers are not charged for KVA-hour usage, but by kilowatt-hour usage. This means that any savings in energy demand will not directly result in lowering a residential user’s utility bill. Second, the only potential for real power savings would occur if the product were only put in the circuit while a reactive load (such as a motor) were running, and taken out of the circuit when the motor is not running. This is impractical, given that there are several motors in a typical home that can come on at any time (refrigerator, air conditioner, HVAC blower, vacuum cleaner, etc.), but the unit itself is intended for permanent, unattended connection near the house breaker panel.

For commercial facilities, power factor correction will rarely be cost-effective based on energy savings alone. The bulk of cost savings power factor correction can offer is in the form of avoided utility charges for low power factor. Energy savings are usually below 1% and always below 3% of load, the higher percentage occurring where motors are a large fraction of the overall load of a facility. Energy savings alone do not make an installation cost effective.

Power factor correction devices are NOT eligible for a federal tax credit.”

Most of the ‘evidence’ to support claims by companies hawking these devices is very unscientific, often times just unsupportable anecdotes by shills talking about how their energy bill went down after installing one of them. This could simply be due to behavioral changes one naturally makes when focusing on an area of improvement, behavior that a customer who purchases an expensive power saving device is likely to engage in without realizing it. To truly measure improvement, you need to run a controlled experiment and I’ve yet to see a legitimate experiment demonstrated when it comes to these devices. Even the videos on the websites don’t bother to measure actual power, just current or power factor before and after which to me means that they are intentionally trying to mislead customers. There are many inexpensive power meters out there such as Kill-A-Watt and yet there are no demos with a power meter used properly, i.e., showing watts consumed before and after installing a PFC device. Instead, they show power factor or current before and after, which makes for an impressive demo, but tells you nothing about the energy savings you’d experience.

If you’re thinking about buying one of these devices, I’d recommend you buy a whole house energy monitor like the TED5000 instead. It will cost less than a useless PFC device and is likely to help you figure out where your energy is going so you will be more aware of how you can save energy. It will also tell you exactly what your power factor is at any moment. As I type this, my furnace blower (a 900W load) is running and my power factor is .94, which is close enough to 1 that it’s hardly worth worrying about.

EntConnect 2010

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I posted over a short article on my consulting site about the upcoming EntConnect conference and I figured I’d make sure that anyone who checks in here gets the message too. The EntConnect conference that sprung out of Midnight Engineering magazine in the 1990s will take place in less than a month, March 25th-28th in downtown Denver. If you’re a tech entrepreneur, or would like to become one, you may want to join us. You’ll learn a lot and have some fun while you’re at it.

Fake Virus Scanner Scams

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By now you’ve no doubt visited at least one website, usually one that appears in page one of Google’s search results, that does a redirect and all of a sudden, what appears to be a virus scanner is now running on your computer screen. It may look something like the window below.

fake virus scanner

Click on the image for a larger version of it.

The image on the screen is animated with the green bars filling in and the % complete changing, and shows that it’s scanning your drives for viruses. It finishes in a surprisingly short time. However, it’s just a JavaScript animation, nothing more, and it’s not doing anything with your files because browsers cannot open your computer’s files without your help. Invariably, it will find threats and invite you to download a product to ‘fix’ them. The other messages that pop up may look like the following:

Most of the popups are harmless, but the last one is an attempt to get you to download an executable file that, if you open it, invariably will end up taking you to a site where you’ll have to put in your credit card number to pay for the virus scanner to remove the viruses and to ‘keep you safe’.

Downloading an .exe file won’t do anything by itself, but if you open an ‘.exe’ file, then all bets are off, because it can do anything it wants, including installing a real virus, which would not be a stretch for a company that is trying to steal from you already.

The safest place to click on the pop-up windows are on the red X’s in the upper right hand corner to close them, but sometimes you’ll find that you can’t get out of the web page or browser because they keep popping up. If your browser keeps a ‘memory’ of the sites you were on when it closed (like Firefox does), it feels like you can’t get rid of the offending site. But there is a way to safely extract yourself from the clutches of these evil doers.

You can disable JavaScript temporarily and all windows will close when you close them and the popups will stop. To disable Javascript on Firefox, just click on Tools->Options->Content and uncheck the box next to JavaScript. You can re-enable it after you’ve gotten out of the website. For Internet Explorer, to disable JavaScript, you can select Tools->Internet Options->Security->Custom Level and scroll to the “Active scripting” section of the list (under “Scripting”) Click Disable.

JavaScript by itself cannot harm your computer, but if you give it help, by actually acting on the pop up messages and saying ‘ok’ or ‘yes’ when you’re in this situation, then you can do yourself some harm, and pay the price for what will be, at best, a useless virus scanner. It’s pretty hard to use the Internet these days with JavaScript disabled, because so many sites depend on it to work properly. So trying to disable JavaScript permanently isn’t really an option.

There are a number of real virus scanners out there, and a popular one is AVG. You can download and install it for free, although it may do some unsavory things such as change your default search engine to Yahoo and install yet another toolbar. These things are easily reversed, of course.

So, you might wonder, how does this happen that a website ends up in page one of Google’s search results and yet is a site that is so obviously evil that it’s trying to extort money from you? It’s usually done by cloaking. When Google’s search bots go looking to index websites, these sites give the search bots a different page filled with keywords that look like an exact match for what you’re searching for so they score high enough to reach page one. However, when the website detects a real browser, it will redirect it to another website that tries to convince you that you have a virus and now must buy some protection. Google and other search engines hate cloaking, but they have a hard time detecting it, since a website can tell whether it’s being visited by a search bot vs. a browser.

If you’ve visited a site like this, you should to do a real virus scan, particularly if you allowed it to download and execute the .exe file. As long as you didn’t open the .exe file, you’re probably OK, but for peace of mind, a scan with AVG or similar virus scanner may help your computer feel just a little less slimy after visiting one of those sites.