another Daylight Saving Time Rant
Again, my annual plea to all, to stop this huge waste of time and energy, that continues on due to plain old bureaucracy and complacency.
Cons:
– labour involved in changing clocks at home, on tv/dvd/vcr and other dumb devices
– labour involved in changing over computers that do not change correctly
– increased danger of driving collisions the spring monday morning
Pros:
– none 🙂
“One of the biggest reasons we change our clocks to Daylight Saving Time (DST) is that it reportedly saves electricity. Newer studies, however, are challenging long-held reason.
In general, energy use and the demand for electricity for lighting our homes is directly connected to when we go to bed and when we get up. Bedtime for most of us is late evening through the year. When we go to bed, we turn off the lights and TV.
In the average home, 25 percent of all the electricity we use is for lighting and small appliances, such as TVs, VCRs and stereos. A good percentage of energy consumed by lighting and appliances occurs in the evening when families are home. By moving the clock ahead one hour, we can cut the amount of electricity we consume each day.”
The above was from an old US study. I would challenge the 25% devoted to lighting and small appliances. The lighting load 10 years ago may have been a half dozen 100 watt incandescent light bulbs and a 24-30″ CRT television. Today we see a dozen 5-10 watt CF or LED bulbs and much less energy used 50″ LCD televisions.
-How does changing the time affect the 1 hour of time you will use the stove for dinner? Not at all. Ditto for electric hot water heaters, washing machines and electric baseboard heat, none of which the daily sum total of power used will be affected.
-How does changing the time affect the 1-2 hours of television you will watch each day? It will not, unless you do not turn on the TV and do something else that does not involve electricity.
Some various studies:
“Likewise, Matthew Kotchen, an environmental economist at Yale, saw in Indiana a situation ripe for study.
Prior to 2006 only 15 of the state’s 92 counties observed daylight saving time. So when the whole state adopted DST, it became possible to compare before-and-after energy use. While use of artificial lights dropped, increased air-conditioning use more than offset any energy gains, according to the daylight saving time research Kotchen led for the National Bureau of Economic Research in 2008.
That’s because the extra hour that daylight saving time adds in the evening is a hotter hour. “So if people get home an hour earlier in a warmer house, they turn on their air conditioning,” the University of Washington’s Wolff said in 2011.
In fact, Hoosier consumers paid more on their electric bills than before they made the annual switch to daylight saving time, the study found. (Related: “Extended Daylight Saving Time Not an Energy Saver?“)”
“Till Roenneberg, a chronobiologist at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, Germany, said in 2010 his studies show that our circadian body clocks—set by light and darkness—never adjust to gaining an “extra” hour of sunlight at the end of the day during daylight saving time.
“The consequence of that is that the majority of the population has drastically decreased productivity, decreased quality of life, increasing susceptibility to illness, and is just plain tired,” Roenneberg said. (Also see “Jet Lag Cure for Mice Illuminates Inner Workings of Circadian Clocks.”)
Here in Ontario we have time of use metering which gives us hour by hour and day by day power use summaries. We will examine ours from the week before to the week after the time change.
I can say with certainty right now that the amount of power used will not be noticeable up against the electric heat needed for yesterdays -29C low temp vs next weeks -10C lows.