Comment by michaelt
8 hours ago
According to [1] Yuasa battery date codes are year-month-day-plant/shift so 090323J0 indicates a battery from 2009.
The building also was "out of operational use by Police Scotland for almost 10 years" and was purchased for community ownership earlier this year, according to [2]
> If someone knew to replace the battery just three years ago, I would expect they also would have enough knowledge to set the clock itself.
From the pictures, it looks like this clock needs to be manually changed on the last Sundays of March and October, for the start and end of daylight savings (they also need to be re-set any time there's a long power outage).
This article is dated early April; it's possible the new community owners of the building (and clock) just needed someone to adjust it by an hour.
The motor in the photo is probably a synchronous AC motor, where the rotation of the shaft matches the exact frequency of the AC supply. Then a long series of gears converts 50 rotations per second to 1 rotation per hour. Which avoids gradual clock drift - but without the fancy digital control needed to automate the daylight savings adjustments.
Nowerdays, you can buy 'clock controllers' [3] that take care of daylight savings time etc automatically.
[1] https://www.hardwarexpress.co.uk/pages/yuasa-date-codes [2] https://www.edinburghnews.scotsman.com/news/edinburgh-plans-... [3] https://www.hawkinsclocks.co.uk/clock-controllers
There are lots of random web sites claiming how to read the Yuasa date code format, but the only official document I found from Yuasa says "contact us for help decoding the date". Here's a photo of the exact same battery on Amazon with a date code of "291118H0". That must be DDMMYY unless the battery was sent to Amazon from the future (or the photo is forged):
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Yucel-Y1-2-6-Sealed-Rechargeable-Ba...
And I just found this EU Declaration of Conformity which includes the Y1.2-6 and says the date code is DDMMYY:
https://www.farnell.com/datasheets/4633451.pdf