DST

Today marks the beginning of Daylight Saving Time for 2015.  It’s almost 8:00 a.m., just beginning to get light outside, and I’m already missing my lost hour of sleep.

Germany first tried Daylight Saving Time in World War I as a way of conserving electricity.  Other countries thought it was a great idea and soon followed suit. The US (except for a few places like Arizona) went to summer-only DST after WWII, and extended it by four weeks in 2007.

The idea behind daylight savings time is to cut back on residential electricity use, which is heaviest at night. By moving the clocks forward in the spring, human activity would start and end earlier, and when people return to their still-sunny houses after work, they wouldn’t need to turn on the lights until an hour later than normal. Great in theory, but numerous studies over the years have proved that it doesn’t work. Sometimes, it actually results in more electricity consumed.

My wife, and probably a lot of other people, think they got it backward – we need the extra hour of daylight in the winter when the days are already too short, not in summer when the sun doesn’t set until late in the evening.  Me, I just want my hour back.