Comment by kijin

The first Eco-Drives came out in the mid 90s. If you look around you'll find quite a few reports from people who bought the very first ones, and which are still ticking away virtually maintenance-free for 25+ years and counting. My own, a dive watch with around 10 years, which has actually been used for its stated purpose, is also still problem-free and with zero maintenance so far.

The only thing you need to be mindful of with Eco-Drives is that you can't let it lose all charge. It can keep functioning in complete darkness for around 6 months, according to the specs, but if you do this enough times the battery will lose the ability to hold charge and will need to be replaced, and there are plenty of reports to this effect. If you're not planning on wearing it, just leave it somewhere that it can get natural light, instead of a drawer, and you should be good.

While mechanical watches are undoubtedly cool and elegant, they're not perfect timekeepers, and when they do need maintenance it's not something trivial which you can perform yourself. For my day-to-day watch I'll take an accurate quartz movement with virtually zero maintenance any day. In other words an Eco-Drive, or something similar.

Solar Casios(I own two) have a replaceable rechargable battery, it costs very little and isn't more difficult to replace than any other watch battery.

It usually is this one in almost all their models:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0080GQBTU/ref=cm_sw_r_awdo_XX5J...

My experience with a very high-end solar Casio was akin to yours, with the battery needing replacing after about five years. Perhaps gambiting is correct about the common nature of the battery, but multiple watch repair shops (both in a department store, and the "old man in a tiny room in an office building" type) refused to deal with it. I always had to mail it to an authorized Casio repair outlet.

I do not know whether this also applies to Eco-Drive.