What trickery is this??

[Ffsnosexallowed]

Last night we had a power cut. It lasted a couple of hours (know this because a nearby house alarm was going off the entire time.....). I have an electric clock radio, which is a bastard to reset. Knew I'd have to reset it this morning.

So how come it's at the right time now????? It goes wrong if you unplug it, and in the past we've only known about power cuts because its been wrong.

I'm confused.

A wizard did it.

Must be that

Small internal batter charges up from the mains to retain a very tiny charge enough to keep the time right in case the power goes off for a second. When I was younger there would be far more micro power cuts and you’d come down in the morning and the VCR clock would be at zero. You’d be pissed off if your alarm did that and went off several hours late.

But electricity was off for at least a couple of hours??

Maybe it wasn't off for as long as you think it was. Sounds to me like it was only off for a few minutes which was enough to set the house alarm off on a loop?

No - it was definitely off for at least 2 hours, house alarm off continuously.

Look, you’ve been given a perfectly sensible and plausible explanation. No one on here knows what model of alarm clock, the capacity of the battery or how long the power actually was off.

What plausible explanation? People do know how long the electricity was off (I could link to suppliers face book page if you need proof?). Maybe there is some sort of internal battery, that's never kicked in before.

I give up!

Probably a radio-controlled clock. They pick up a signal from an official time source when it's powered on and calibrate the time automatically.

Now that would make sense