And some tips about keeping your diving watch running smoothly. Plus factual info on DLC
Gear Junkies read on!
The Citizen BN 0176-08E PROMASTER 300m saturation diver's watch sits second from Citizen's top professional model the 1000m
BN7020-09E.
I have been wearing an ECO DRIVE Citizen watch now for over 20 years of non stop running, no secondhand 2 second skipping movements (meaning it had a low power issue), accurate time keeping. That is my qualifying statement to you, reassuring you about what you are to read, is based upon real 24/7 usage, meaning: diving, surfing, snorkelling; caving and anything else that water is a necessary part of having fun.
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| Citizen BN 0176-08E PROMASTER ECO DRIVE 300m saturation diver's watch, meant to be used! |
Why did I move to this watch? Why not just the current ECO DRIVE 200m? After all, the 200m served me well (as did my SEIKO 100m and 200m dive watches did and do.
Simply if you use a watch to go diving then one really appreciates a bezel which is easy to turn wearing thick dive gloves or any sort of dive gloves. The huge notches in the bezel of the BN 0176-08E are dead easy to get your wet fingers or wet gloves on and turn. I don't want to be cocking around on the surface with everyone waiting to descend because I can't (or someone else) can not set their watch quickly and efficiently! Yes it does make a difference (if you are a diver then you will appreciate a timely and ordered descent).
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Distinctive Citizen PROMASTER logo on the screw in crown, big chunky gaps in the DLC coated bezel allow easy finger gripping.
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Rugged appearance for a rugged watch design. It features easy to see Fluorescent orange minute and second hands
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| Easy to read in low light, although one has to look twice sometime until getting used to the hour hand resembling the hour makers in shape and size. |
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| To be honest I saw no difference (as in charging time required or duration of emission and intensity of emission over time) between SEIKO's renown LUMIBRITE phosphor and this one Citizen are using. |
The watch is anti-magnetic and will resist magnetic fields of 4800 A/M
In the International System of Units, H, magnetic field strength, is measured in the SI base units of ampere per meter
What does this mean in practical terms in relation to strong magnets?
4800A/M is approximately 60 gauss! This is the ISO 764 standard. In other words and small Neodymium magnet, approximately 10mm in diameter and 3 mm thick is going to destroy your watch if placed close by! The approximate gauss rating is about 3600 gauss! So if you put one of these tiny magnets on the back of your watch to "see what happens" then the result will probably be NOT MUCH, as in the watch will stop working! Not worth the experiment I reckon.
Aesthetics about the Citizen BN0176-08E
This current 2020 model (according to the Japanese Citizen site) stainless steel (probably L316) and the bezel surface treated with a DLC coating via Citizen's proprietary PVD.
Let's talk a little about this and what it means in terms of functionality.
DLC stands for "Diamond Like Carbon". Citizen Holdings Co. Ltd have many patents when it comes to surface treatments.
Inventor:(Yukio Miya) assignee:(Citizen Watch Co Ltd). The DLC film/coatings they apply to their products can have a hardness of 1800 on the Vickers hardness scale. (HV: Vickers hardness, micro tester; load 5 grams, retention time 10 seconds)
DLC was first demonstrated by S. AISENBERG & R. CHABOT, “Ion-Beam Deposition of Thin Films of Diamond like Carbon,” J. Appl. Phys., 42, 7 (1971) 2953
If you really want to understand what DLC is then read the above paper! It was actually discovered by accident!
The bottom diagram illustrates typical DLC devices for creating the films.
(Image taken from History and Applications of Diamond-Like Carbon Manufacturing Processes
DLC coatings improve corrosion resistance, reduce frictional forces and increase surface hardness. Is it a gimmick? Short answer is NO!
What it (DLC) does do, is to provide a contrasting color tone to their "decorative article" that is resistant to wear and tear, unlike, simply painting a metallic part or applying a less wear resistant coating/film. It the under surface of the bezel also bears a DLC film then it will also help reduce frictional forces. Unfortunately I was not able to ascertain this latter information from Citizen, nor did I want to purposefully pull apart my new watch for obvious reasons!
For example: I own a SEIKO Prospex 200m air diving watch, a gift from my aged mother of 88. I've: swam; dived, surfed and jumped into rivers etc with this watch which until recently was on my wrist 24/7 (my son has it now, as he is more active for an automatic movement) BUT the bezel (turned many times in the salt water; is losing it's color! Why? Well, simply because it is a painted bezel and paint is essentially "plastic" and plastic wears!
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| Note the painted numbers and bezel colours are already wearing off on my SEIKO Prospex 200m diver (ok I'll paint it myself later) but the watch is only a year or so old. One thing which annoys me is that watch companies churn out diving watches with the aim of satisfying the armchair diver, who will never give the watch a beating and hence these things like i point out here, will never wear but using it for diving is another matter. Eg sand abrasion in the water etc. |
Best practices for charging your Citizen BN 0176-08E
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| Showing the reflection of an LED desk lamp (no I certainly do not use such lamps (or any lamps for that matter to charge my ECO DRIVE watches, including this one). Real coconut palms and accompanying sunshine are recommended! |
Firstly any woosy light such as a LED desk lamp just isn't going to cut it unless you have loads of time on your hands. The only benefit is that you won't "cook" your watch by using an LED lamp. This is of course if you are in a country which lacks ample sunshine! A funny story: (well I reckon it is). 20 odd years ago when I was working as a scientist in the United Kingdom, I decided to purchase my first ECO DRIVE watch. I had seen a PhD student wearing one in another lab and liked the design and his positive words about it. In fact several people were sporting this model in different variations at work. Upon my delight in receiving it, I proceeded to show it to my colleagues. The response from one of them: "Are you stupid? You bought a solar powered watch in the UK? Don't you know there is no sun here?" Anyway, I thought it was funny (at the time!)
SO in order to get the most from your ECO DRIVE, give it the full sun treatment whenever possible and measure your 11 hours to full charge, as it will be near impossible to determine how much light it had received (if any) before you got it. Whilst it may not show the 2 second movement of the second hand, this does not mean it has a full charge of 6 months duration.
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| Full afternoon sun is better than full morning to midday sun. The latter is best but you must be able to keep the watch body cool! I prefer to charge them not behind a window if possible, for example: on an open balcony (where someone can't "lift" your watch too!) |
However, realistically, if one doesn't regularly inhabit the sun and really wants to charge their ECO DRIVE without "hurting it" one could do like this maniac does.
Put their ECO DRVE under a 125W CFL grow light! about 20cm away. The watch placed ontop of a very large chunk of aluminium as a heat sink.
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| Under a 125 W CFL bulb approximately 20cm away from the actual globe itself to avoid excess heating. ie under 37C |
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| Citizen BN 0176-08E placed atop of a "spare chunk of T8082 aluminium" which just happened to be lying around the house LOL! |
How does Citizen Do it? (You will not find this info in any manual: The following information was taken by me from a live presentation by Mr Jay Spring of Citizen USA (back in 2nd August 2003)
Citizen actually charge their Eco drive watches using a bank of GE full spectrum fluorescent tubes, where the watches are place about 3 inches away from 13,000 LUX of light (this is the amount of light seen on a cloudy day). The ambient temperature does not exceed 27C (82F). Note this temperature. This is 10 C below wrist temperature.
The expected life of the Eco Drive Energy Cell is approximately 40 years and even after 20 years the expected performance is only down 20% to 80% capacity ie the cell will still maintain 80% of it's charge! The energy cell can take over 500 cycles from dead to fully charged.
Does the Eco Drive battery have a memory problem?
No.
Partial charge and discharge does not matter.
At the time of this presentation the general battery chemistry Citizen was using was Manganese Titanium Lithium Ion.
Low Charge Indicator
All Eco drives feature a low charge indicator. This model, the Citizen BN 0176-08E the second hand will jump at 2 second intervals indicating the battery requires charging immediately.
Charging Efficiency
Dark coloured dial watches such as the BN 0176-08E will charge faster than a lighter coloured dial. The reason being that a dark coloured dial can be made thinner in terms of colour and hence transmit more light to the solar cell. The coloured dial, the plastic thickness must be greater to hide the watches movement underneath.
For more information on recharging please see the FAQ section I published from citizen shown here
After a full recharge from a flat battery the watch MUST BE RESET see the above link on how to do this.
End of 2003 presentation
A killer of (ALL) Dive watches
As with all dive watches, the biggest (realistic) killer of them is SAND ingression whilst diving and or swimming and surfing. The more nooks and crannies in the design the more chance of sand ingression and eventually wearing out the mechanism, or worse still wearing out the body (the demise of my bezel on a previous 7878 ECO DRIVE).
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| Like I said, FULL SUN IS BEST used to charge your watch but let let it overheat! |
How can I tell if my ECO DRIVE BN 0176-08E has a full charge?
Answer: You can't! BUT what you can do, is after receiving it (you have no idea of the charging conditions of the seller, if any at all, excepting if you receive the watch and the second hand is skipping 2 seconds) you can expose it (recording the hours of course) to full sunlight for a total of at least 11 hours (dependent upon the intensity (season) of the sun, for most places.
In reality that's going to be about 12 days of full sun because you aren't going to leave the watch probably more than an hour each day in full sun, you'd be forever moving it to stay in full sun! That's my experience with charging solar watches.
Well with the exception of the interface between watch crystal and bezel, all sites of possible ingression are placed horizontally. To compare with something else I will refer once again to my recent SEIKO PROSPEX 200m baby tuna. It has 2 regions: the crystal bezel interface plus the region where the shroud comes in very close to the bezel. Enough space to catch sand particles in the water and or sand whipped up in the air.
Wash immediately in fresh running water , watch tilted vertically into the stream of water! Try not to dive in super murky water (ok if it is diving for work, then you can probably claim on damaged watches!).
Be patient, don't try to wrench your sticky bezel, otherwise you will destroy the internal ratchet one way mechanism. I did this on a early Citizen I have (pity as it had seen much shark action and has a lot of sentimental value to me- but no longer good for diving).
(BIG) Wrist Presence?
"I really like this watch but it might be a bit big for my wrist, what do you reckon?"
Well, I've been wearing diving watches on my wrist/s for a long time, in fact since a teenager, that was over 35 years ago, so I'd say I'm pretty used to the relative "chunky" appearance/feel/look; or as they say today, "wrist presence" of the diving watch. This particular model, the Citizen BN 0176-08E is ever so slightly bigger (ok maybe a bit of an exaggeration in terms of my other watches bar the PROSPEX 200m ) in thickness than any of my previous dive watches.
My first proper dive watch was the SEIKO slim line model quartz tsunami dive watch and it served me very well on many of my scuba diving adventures. I simply gave up on getting battery changes every 3 years and the regular pressure tests, they far surpassed the cost of the watch over time! Same fate was for another Citizen 100m dive watch, saw lots of UW action but battery changes and pressure tests killed it in the end. It just wasn't cost effective. Next came my first ECO DRIVE which lasted 20 years straight (still going actually as I already stated above) and then a year ago I got a SEIKO baby tuna 4R36 200m dive watch. Now my son has it but NOW, this baby, the Citizen BN-0176-08E. So do I think it's too big to wear on a daily basis? Well no! I should say I'm a 24/7 watch wearer and if i'm not wearing a watch I feel kinda naked LOL! My real job demands a watch be worn as phones are out and let's face it, a real man wears a watch LOL! I didn't buy this current watch to look at per se but to wear a a dive watch and use as a rugged time keeping instrument. The BN 176-08E is a lot different in size to the ginormous "clock" of a watch, the current Citizen 1000m diving "machine" LOL. That watch is strictly for diving only and lots of it.
Anyway check out my (long) video review of the Citizen BN 0176-08E Promaster 300 dive watch here.
Cool Observations Regarding Charging of this Citizen ECO DRIVE the BN0176-08E . 11/3/2020
I noticed that whilst my watch second hand is not skipping every 2 seconds, which would indicate a low battery power and need for charging; It is not landing exactly on the second markers, I noticed this too once in about twenty years of wearing my other ECO DRIVE and I have read where people say the movement is not accurate on the second markers. however, after much careful observations, I note that If I expose the watch to full MORNING sunlight, the second hand aligns perfectly to the second markers. This to me means that the watch is still in need of a proper charging in the sun. Nothing to worry about as the watch is keeping brilliant time.
This makes total sense as I know that even for a CASIO ProTrek Solar digital watch, it needs a good 15 hours of full strength summer sunlight in order to fully charge the battery from a low power state to the "H" indicator on the watch, meaning a full battery charge.
See the video review here BushCampingTools
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