this is so wacky! we just change time?! daylight savings is HORRIBLE! once, i went to an island near fiji, and the man who owned it CREATED his own time zone!!! like 'i'm so rich i'm going to create my own timezone..'

What is so horrible about it?

I can't say I'm crazy about it, either. But that's a personal thing. If it saves the country 3 billion kw hours, I'm not going to complain.

They should just split the difference and change the time permantantly 1/2 hour in the middle. And never have to change the clocks again!!!

Oh, so that's what the news was about the time change was mentioned on TV.

I remember when Daylight Savings was given a try where I live many years ago. It was supposedly for energy-saving purposes, but I don't think it worked that well, since it wasn't implemented again.

I don't understand how this saves power. Where does this magic saved energy come from when you cut the dark minutes off the end of the day and stick them at the beginning?

Instead of turning my lights on at night, on daylight savings time I turn them on in the morning (shaving in the dark sucks), so the savings can't come from lighting use...

I still use my dishwasher & washing machine, daylight savings or not, so the savings isn't there...

The street-lamps come on in the dark, no matter what the clocks say, so there's no savings there...

Office buildings stay lit according to baroque rules that have little to do with clocks, so there's no savings to be had there...

What am I missing?

Or are DST proponents only looking at evening consumption figures when they tell us it saves energy?

I love daylight savings time because it makes the morning so much more pleasant for early risers and also, from a practical perspective, it makes the transition to the brutal wakeups for the fall olive harvest so much easier.

This is what happens when you only vote republican and democrat, you get endless stupidity.

Why change the clocks at all?
set it and forget it at the optimal time.

It wasn't daylight savings time that save all this power. It was more and more corporations going green that saved this energy. If they are not given credit for it then others will not follow.

D~W

Crosius, presumably people use more lighting at night than in the morning. And come spring, the sun is up earlier and earlier. But people sleep into the same time and start missing more and more of the early dawn sunlight. Better to shift that light to the evening.

The amazing thing is that we have a way to make everybody change their schedule by an hour instantly. The power of the concept of time.

As long as we are slaves to the clock we need daylight savings time as a crude way to adjust to the seasons.

Steve> That "presumably" was exactly my point - we're presuming we use more energy in that first hour of darkness at night than we do if it's the last hour of darkness in the morning, but where are the statistics to back that up?

I see a lot of articles on how much less electricity we use in the evening by switching to DST, but I don't see articles on increased energy consumption during morning activities with daylight- savings time. It's an unexamined gap in the arguments for DST.

I'd also like to see the commuter accident reports for the first work-day after the DST switches, when people are a> groggy from DST-induced "jet-lag" or b> driving too fast because they forgot to change their alarm clocks and are running behind. I know that I share the road with a lot more cars those two Mondays, so at the very least density is up and average speed is down during that commute, which might mean more idling cars in high-congestion areas resulting in more idling-related pollutants.

I'm not against DST, especially if it saves energy, but I think the "DST saves energy" meme is more of a sacred-cow factoid than a genuine, vetted fact.

These daylight saving scheme is just a number game. If the extra weeks can save 3 billion kilowatt hours, why don't we have it permanently and save even more without the hassle of moving the clock back and forth!

DST is not universally accepted and many localities do not observe it. Opponents claim that there is not enough benefit to justify the need to adjust clocks twice every year. The disruption in sleep patterns associated with setting clocks either forward or backward correlates with a small increase in the number of fatal auto accidents[5] (cf. above estimate of net decrease in fatal auto accidents of 50) as well as lost productivity as sleep-disrupted workers adjust to the schedule change.[6] It is also noted that much effort is spent reminding everyone twice a year of the change, and thousands are inconvenienced by showing up at the wrong time when they forget.[citation needed] Since DST exchanges morning daylight for evening daylight, late sunrises occur when DST is in effect either too far before the vernal equinox or too far after the autumnal equinox and darkness in the morning can be undesirable for early risers like schoolchildren and workers who must awaken at 6:30 a.m. or earlier.

There is also a question whether the decrease in lighting costs justifies the increase in summertime air conditioning costs. Workers arriving home to an empty house during hotter hours will need to use more energy to cool their house.[citation needed]

It is also speculated that one of the benefits—more afternoon sun—would also actually increase energy consumption as people get into their cars to enjoy more time for shopping and the like.[citation needed]

DST's twice-annual shifts in recorded time cause legal and business-operational complications, as shown in the following examples. During a North American time change, a fall night during which clocks are reset from 2 a.m. DST to 1 a.m. Standard Time, times between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m. will occur twice, causing confusion in transport schedules, payment systems, etc.[citation needed] DST's annual autumn shift in recorded time—which causes an hour of the same numerical name to be recorded twice—also means that people born during one of those two hours have no way to know which of standard time or DST was used to record the time of their birth, unless someone such as a parent makes a note of it; birth certificates rarely keep track of this. A British politician, Lord Balfour, noted the legal complications in British law: "Supposing some unfortunate Lady was confined with twins and the first child was born 10 minutes before 3 o'clock British Summer Time. ... the time of birth of the two children would be reversed. ... Such an alteration might conceivably affect the property and titles in that House."[7]

Daylight saving time also causes much confusion with international business, people who commute across time zones, and computer networks that span multiple time zones. One particular problem for scheduling systems is that it makes the length of a day variable. Each year there is one 23 hour day and one 25 hour day, causing display and time tracking problems, especially when coordinating events between time zones.

Some studies do show that changing the clock increases the traffic accident rate.[8] Following the spring shift to DST, when one hour of sleep is lost, there is a measurable increase in the number of traffic accidents that result in fatalities.

People who work nights often have an extra hassle logging how many hours they worked, since it will be either one hour more or one hour less than the simple difference in start/stop times.

DST is particularly unpopular among people working in agriculture[9] because they must rise with the sun regardless of what the clock says, and thus the people are placed out of synchronization with the rest of the community, including school times, broadcast schedules, and the like.

5 ^ "Fatal accidents following changes in daylight savings [sic time: the American experience"], Jason Varughese and Richard P. Allen. March 28, 2000. URL accessed August 15, 2006.
6 ^ [1] "Sleep Deprivation, Psychosis and Mental Efficiency"], Stanley Corren, PhD. March 1998. URL accessed September 22, 2006.
7 ^ The Epoch Times "Daylight Saving Time Change Upcoming" Lord Balfour quote. "Supposing some unfortunate Lady was confined with twins..."
8 ^ Ferguson, S.A. et al. (1995) Daylight saving time and motor vehicle crashes: the reduction in pedestrian and vehicle occupant fatalities. American Journal of Public Health 85, 92–95.
9 ^ "History & Info - Daylight Saving Time", 21 October 2006,

3b kwh @ 0.098$USD/kwh = ~294000000$USD

US Military budget (ala wikipedia [1]):

Total Funding $441.6 Billion
Operations and maintenance $124.3 Bil.
Military Personnel $108.8 Bil.
Procurement $79.1 Bil.
Research, Development, Testing & Evaluation $69.5 Bil.
Military Construction $12.2 Bil.
Department of Energy Defense Activities $17.0 Bil.

There are better ways to save $USD and energy.

Also, dept. energy kwh used in 2003: "The U.S. as a whole used 3,883 billion kWh in 2003" [2]. 3bkwh is not one percent of the 2003 usage... how can it be of the 2006 usage?

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_of_the_United_States#Expenditures
[2] - http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/cost.html (references USDOE numbers)

I think the additional cost everyone is overlooking is... what about all the technology that automatically updates for DST that will now be obsolete? Computers can be patched with an update, however there are millions of clocks, tv's, vcr's, electronic dayplanners, digital camera's, etc that all automatically update the time...and have no way to update their software. Now that automatic setting clock radio you use to wake everyday, instead of needing to be set for daylight savings time ZERO times a year... now needs set FOUR times a year. How many people aren't going to deal with that and will just send their current alarm clock to the landfill and upgrade to a new model that has the daylight savings time calendar correct to match the new law?

@anonymous:
If you're going to copy out of Wikipedia, at least say it is...

I liked DST the way it was because when Halloween happened the next week, it was suddenly dark really early. That made it spooky. Next year, I expect to see kids come out at the same time (5:30) even though it is light out.

""Why change the clocks at all?
set it and forget it at the optimal time.""

If you ever live in a place where the sun doesn't go down until 10PM at night and doesn't come up until 8AM the next morning you'll understand why.

Hello,

Maybe the thing to think about here is not how DST saves us money, but more importantly why is it changing. An obvious but ignored answer, GLOBAL WARMING. Its time for change, we are in the process of making the environment unsuitable for human life but who cares anyway. We are all a bunch of money hungry, self cenered individuals and we obviously could care less about future generations...why even bother raising a kid, oh, yeah, becasue you will have enough money to build him a bio-dome, and buy him UV resistant clothing, so much for the rest of us. Blame the baby boomers, I do, you made some real bad decisions and are leaving your children to pay the price, nice work!

Hello,
Maybe I'm just really, really slow and am not getting this but here it goes;

Doesn't daylight saving's time also depend on when the sun actually goes up and goes down this year? Unless I'm missing the fact that the actual Spring time is starting on March 11th? I guess I always thought, and I geuss I thought wrong, that this whole daylight savings time thing was done because we had one more hour of daylight, and then in the fall, one hour back because we have one less hour. Is it me or on March 11th, at 6pm (EST), it will be dark out, correct? Because if not then someones also controlling the sun and then I'm really missing out on something.

Like I said, this thing shouldn't be so confusing but I'm super confused. Lolz someone please clarify this.

It's a scam! The effect is that we have to pay our bills faster. Your phone bills, your credit card bills, the payment cycle is shortened, so that we end up paying more for less. It's like when Julius Caesar "reformed" the calendar, and the revolt, "give us back our 10 days", or similar. JP MORGAN CHASE seems to be the main culprit. It's all about the Venus' 20 year cycle and lunar stand-still. In 1986, during the Reagan years (remember the story of how Reagan made decisions based on astrological readings) they changed DST to take effect in 1987. The result is that at first, market rise, but then the market crashed. 20 years later, another Venusian-lunar standstill, another DST change. JP Morgan, the founder of the Morgan bank, was fond of saying that "anyone can be a millionaire, but to become a BILLIONAIRE you need an astrologer". Watch the market crash. Why on Nov 4, election year? to be continued

I went to bed last night thinking the clocks would go back on the last Saturday of October. I found out different after waking on Sunday morning. I had not heard a word about the extention. I do feel it should have been more widely publicized.

I love daylight savings time and would be for keeping it all year, except for one thing. If I remember correctly, daylight savings was orginally started so the school kids wouldn't be leaving home in the dark. That is enough reason for me to fall back in October, but now they are extending it for energy saving reasons... Bah HUMBUG!! people make up your minds. In this case I vote to keep DST all year long.

Now in March, when it is still winter, we all get up in the dark, turn on the lights and crank up the heater. After the time change in spring 2007 we had several below zero mornings, and now rather than being warm in my bed, I had to get up during the dark. One of the best things about March was always the light in the morning. Now that is gone the coldest part of the day and fumble around in because of the retailers' lobbiest who wined and dinned congress to pass some legislation that is good for no one except the retaliers.
Further the reality of the extra day light at the end of the day in March is that there is very little you can do with it.
I live in Maine the easternmost state in the Eastern Time Zone and I hated the springtime DST extension. I can't imagine how people in the western parts of the time zones deal with it.

I LOVE DAYLIGHT SAVINGS! I was looking online for bumper stickers, I love it sooo much, and found this forum. I have pets, and grand children, and we have more time in the evenings to do things outdoors. If you have a garden and you dont get home till 5, then your time to be outside is limited.
Is it that hard to change your clock twice a year?
My goodness, I would volunteer to change clocks for people, if I thought it would keep the daylight savings! If it saves energy, less lights used then dont be a hater ! we need sunshine! Love it, Love it, Love it!