Campus clocks yet to be fixed

By Eisa Al Nashmi

Fresno State never gets the time right.

It’s because now most clocks on campus are off by a few minutes—some several hours late.

The power outage two weeks ago caused many clocks in some buildings—like the McLane Hall and the Speech Arts Building—to be off by about four hours.

Robert Boyd, director of facilities management at Fresno State, said many of the original Fresno State buildings use an old centralized clock system, which is located in the department of plant operations and sends electrical signals to other clocks on campus to ensure synchronized time.

“The system was installed in the late 60s,” Boyd said. “It is outdated and it is not as dependable as many people think it is.”

For that reason, Boyd said, they went to battery clocks on the newer buildings, such as the Peters Building. It is still difficult to keep the time synchronized and costly to manually change clocks twice a year.

Rick Finden, assistant director of plant operations, said the campus has about 2,000 clocks, most of which are battery operated. About 1,000 clocks need to be manually changed twice a year because of daylight savings time, which takes 233 hours a year to get the job done, Finden said.

Finden said manually changing the time doesn’t guarantee synchronization because it does not ensure the clocks will have the same time; they may be off by a few minutes.

“We are a time-driven society, and it is frustrating to see clocks that are off by many minutes,” Finden said.

Finden said the department of plant operations is aware of the time problems, but it is waiting for the time to change before the fixing starts.

“Instead of fixing the clocks twice in three weeks, it is much easier and less costly to do it once when the time changes,” Finden said.

To avoid any future problems with time, Boyd said the department of plant operations is considering converting to an atomic clock system, which will capture a time signal from the U.S. government’s Global Positioning System. The signal will be sent to a transmitter on campus, which then broadcasts the time to every clock.

“It is a very accurate system that will automatically reset itself when time changes,” Boyd said. “The atomic system will make sure all clocks are synchronized.”

Boyd said the atomic system will save his department time and money.

The first phase of the purchasing and installition of the clocks will begin late next spring.