More humidity and clock 1

Clock 1 has been mostly reliably running over the past month in our dining room.  It stopped this weekend (April 16) briefly, and then much more extensively today.  Today, it stopped around 8:30am after everyone had left.  I tried to start it again in the afternoon when I got home around 4pm, and spent the next 3 hours fighting with it.  I did find that the escape pinion was slipping -- now fixed -- but it seemed like there was just a general lack of power getting to the escapement.  I couldn't find anything distinctly wrong aside from that, though.

Today was quite warm and humid throughout most of the daylight hours, so this seems to account for the problem.  We had a very short, but very intense thunderstorm around 9-10pm.  After that, the clock started running without any further complications...  The temperature and humidity dropped rather dramatically, so this seems to be anecdotally the cause.

So I went and gathered some historical data to see if that shed any light on the situation.  I got data from http://www.localconditions.com/weather-silver-spring-maryland/20901/past.php and scraped that with a short Python script.

The temperature has been fluctuating quite a bit over the past month.  But it doesn't seem to correlate with either of the clock stopping events.

The air pressure seems mostly irrelevant as well; the clock seems to run fine regardless.

The humidity is really erratic (2 day average in green), like the temperature, though both stoppages did occur with high humidity.

What seems to be causative, though, is the product of the temperature and humidity.  The two largest values (and also the largest deviations from the 2 day averages) were today and over the previous weekend (April 16), both when the clock stopped.

This indicates that the expansion in the wood is really quite small usually, and it takes both factors at work to cause a problem.  More study is surely needed, and I'm sure the weather changing into summer will be interesting...