Are watch winders bad for your watch?

Naturally you may be concerned about putting your treasured watch in a watch winder, this article should put your fears to rest.

Can a watch winder overwind or damage my watch?

No, a watch winder can’t damage your watch. Your watch movement requires a minimum amount of tpd (turns per day) to keep it ticking away. Should you exceed this, then the movement has an inbuilt clutch type mechanism that simply dumps any excess energy created with zero impact or detriment to your watch. For this reason, you cannot overwind an automatic watch.

To illustrate this, you might ask yourself ‘how many tpd do I generate for my watch each day?’ The question is pretty much unanswerable. In reality we have no idea how much energy we generate each day for our watch, it will depend on how active a lifestyle you lead. For instance, you may have quieter days and more lively days, but it would never cross your mind to remove the watch for fear of overwinding it!

For example, casting your mind back to that wonderful day in the jewellery shop when you decided to actually buy the watch, the store assistant will have sat in front of you and given the watch a full manual wind using the winding crown, and then you put it on your wrist and continued to wind it kinetically for the rest of the day. At no point did you consider taking it off for fear of overwinding! The same with a watch winder – you cannot over wind an automatic watch.

ChronoVision One Black Silk & Carbon

You may or may not know that many watches share movements from brand to brand. There are a few brands that produce their own movements but many including Tag Heuer, Omega, Breitling and many, many more buy in movements and ‘decorate’ them to look like their own. Furthermore, any watch winder can wind any automatic watch. Generally, get an idea of budget and style and then look at what is available. You can look at how many tpd your watch requires per day on our database by clicking here, but remember, you can’t overwind it.

A watch can sit in a watch winder indefinitely. Leave it in there until you want to wear it next. Just keep an eye on the battery life if you are not running off the mains power. The autonomy of a watch winder depends on the efficiency of the motor and also how you have it setup.

The watch brand doesn’t usually dictate which way it will require rotating to charge the mainspring. If a watch movement requires CW only, that doesn’t mean you can’t rotate it CCW! That would render it somewhat impossible to wear! It simply means that it will not charge the mainspring while rotating CCW. For this reason, all the watch winders that we stock at 1010 Boutique have the option of CW, CCW and Bi-Directional rotation settings.

Yes, watch winders are suitable for all types of watches but they will only benefit automatic watches. You can keep a manual wind or a quartz watch in a watch winder, it just won’t wind it. Nevertheless, it is a nice place to store and display your watch! Automatic watches of any brand will be well suited in any of our watch winders.

Yes indeed you do leave watch winders on all the time. There is no need to turn them off. Remember, as mentioned above, you cannot overwind an automatic watch.

Once programmed, your watch winder will do it's job of keeping your watch wound. If however, you are planning on wearing your watch and not putting it back in the winder for an extended period of time, then, to save power or battery life, it may be worth turning it to 'off' or 'standby' (if available).

Be aware that should you turn off a watch winder for a prolonged period, and depending on the brand, when turning back on, it may require reprogramming.

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