Daylight Savings

We're now a few weeks past daylight savings, although my VCR (purchased in 2000) thinks it was a more recent event.  I manually reset the time when we "sprang forward" on March 11th.  Over the past weekend it re-adjusted itself, so that it's now an hour ahead of where it's supposed to be.  Thanks technology!

I hear a lot about daylight savings every time it rolls around.  Around our house there is no love lost on having to roll the clocks forward and backward, or throwing off the kids' schedules.  Fortunately springtime is not the worse of the two time changes, since it effectively gets the kids to wake up later.  Fall is the real problem, when all of the sudden the early risers are up way too early.

I've heard the whole phenomenon attributed to Ben Franklin, although this year I read that he didn't actually advocate a changing of clocks.  His idea was more along the lines of ringing church bells to get people up earlier when the sun rose earlier.  That sort of communal, forced wake up is probably not ideal either, but more and more I look at Arizona (which doesn't observe DST, for those not in the know) and I think they may actually be on to something.

In this day and age it's difficult to believe that time-shifting is really doing much to save energy.  It's definitely no longer necessary to rise early to get all your work done for the day, unless you're actually a farmer.  For the rest of us we have the miracle of electric lighting, which I'm sure most of us use throughout the day regardless of the sun's position outside.

Consider the power consumed in your home, and I think you'll find that the energy going into lighting is a fraction of the total consumption.  Appliances run all hours of the day, and don't get less use because the clocks change.  Heating and cooling systems run according to timers and thermostats.  There may be some efficiency from having higher or lower settings in "off" (sleeping) hours, but not much.  Comparatively, lights are a miniscule power draw.

It's time for a change!  The next candidate for state legislature that runs on a platform of Daylight Wastings will definitely be getting my vote.