The deal with Daylight Savings

Say today is the official day the Daylight Savings has ended for Western Australia.. All those hours we lost to having a stretch day hours are now back in our hands... nyways lets recap what is the deal with this Daylight Savings anyway...


Daylight saving time (DST; also summer time in British English) is the convention of advancing clocks so that afternoons have more daylight and mornings have less. Typically clocks are adjusted forward one hour near the start of spring and are adjusted backward in autumn. Modern DST was first proposed in 1907 by William Willett. Many countries have used it since then; details vary by location and change occasionally.

The practice can be controversial. Adding daylight to afternoons benefits retailing, sports, and other activities that exploit sunlight after working hours, but causes problems for farming, entertainment and other occupations tied to the sun. Extra afternoon daylight reduces traffic fatalities; its effect on health and crime is less clear.
An early goal of DST was to reduce evening usage of incandescent lighting, formerly a primary use of electricity; changes in usage patterns have cast doubt on whether DST now saves energy.

DST's clock shifts can serve as fire safety reminders, but they complicate timekeeping and can disrupt meetings, travel, billing, recordkeeping, medical devices, and heavy equipment.
Many computer-based systems can adjust their clocks automatically, but this can be limited and error-prone, particularly when DST rules change.

Although not punctual in the modern sense, the ancients adjusted daily schedules to the sun more flexibly than modern DST does, often dividing daylight into 12 equal hours regardless of day length, so that each daylight hour was longer during summer. For example, Roman water clocks had different scales for different months of the year: at Rome's latitude the third hour from sunrise, hora tertia, started by modern standards at 09:02 solar time and lasted 44 minutes at the winter solstice, but at the summer solstice it started at 06:58 and lasted 75 minutes. After ancient times, equal-length civil hours eventually supplanted unequal, so civil time no longer varies by season. Unequal hours are still used in a few traditional settings, such as some Mount Athos monasteries.

Benjamin Franklin suggested firing cannons at sunrise to waken Parisians.During his time as an American envoy to France, Benjamin Franklin, author of the proverb,

"Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise"

anonymously published a letter suggesting that Parisians economize on candles by rising earlier to use morning sunlight. This 1784 satire proposed taxing shutters, rationing candles, and waking the public by ringing church bells and firing cannons at sunrise. Franklin did not propose DST; like ancient Rome, 18th-century Europe did not keep accurate schedules. However, this soon changed as rail and communication networks came to require a standardization of time unknown in Franklin's day.

William Willett invented DST and advocated it tirelessly.The prominent English builder and outdoorsman William Willett invented DST in 1905 during one of his pre-breakfast horseback rides, when he observed with dismay how many Londoners slept through the best part of a summer day. An avid golfer, he also disliked cutting short his round at dusk. His solution was to advance the clock during the summer months, a proposal he published two years later. He lobbied unsuccessfully for the proposal until his death in 1915; see Politics for more details. Wartime Germany, its allies, and their occupied zones were the first European countries to use DST, starting April 30, 1916. Britain, most other belligerents, and many European neutrals soon followed suit, Russia and a few other countries waited until the next year, and the United States did not use it until 1918. Since then the world has seen many enactments, adjustments, and repeals.

Benefits and drawbacks
Willett's 1907 proposal argued that DST increases opportunities for outdoor leisure activities during afternoon sunlight hours. Obviously it does not change the length of the day; the longer days nearer the summer solstice in high latitudes merely offer more room to shift apparent daylight from morning to evening so that early morning daylight is not wasted. DST is commonly not observed during most of winter, because its mornings are darker: workers may have no sunlit leisure time, and children may need to leave for school in the dark.

General agreement about the day's layout confers so many advantages that a standard DST schedule usually outranks ad hoc efforts to get up earlier, even for people who personally dislike the DST schedule. The advantages of coordination are so great that many people ignore whether DST is in effect by altering their nominal work schedules to coordinate with daylight, television broadcasts, or remote colleagues.


Energy use
Delaying the nominal time of sunset and sunrise reduces the use of artificial light in the evening and increases it in the morning. As Franklin's 1784 satire pointed out, lighting costs are reduced if the evening reduction outweighs the morning increase, as in high-latitude summer when most people wake up well after sunrise. An early goal of DST was to reduce evening usage of incandescent lighting, formerly a primary use of electricity. Although energy conservation remains an important goal, statistically significant evidence for it has proved elusive:

The U.S. Dept. of Transportation (DOT) concluded in 1975 that DST might reduce the country's electricity usage by 1% during March and April, but the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) reviewed the DOT study in 1976 and found no significant energy savings.

In 2000 when parts of Australia began DST in late winter, overall electricity consumption did not decrease, but the morning peak load and prices increased.
Although a 2007 study estimated that introducing DST to Japan would reduce household lighting energy consumption,a 2007 simulation estimated that DST would increase overall energy use in Osaka residences by 0.13%, with a 0.02% decrease due to less lighting more than outweighed by a 0.15% increase due to extra cooling; neither study examined non-residential energy use.
A 2007 California study found no clear evidence that electricity would be saved through the earlier start to DST that year, and although one utility did report a decrease in March 2007, five others did not.

A 2007 study estimated that winter daylight saving would prevent a 2% increase in average daily electricity consumption in Great Britain.
DST may increase gasoline consumption: U.S. gasoline demand grew an extra 1% during the newly introduced DST in March 2007.

Economic effects
Retailers, sporting goods makers, and other businesses benefit from extra afternoon sunlight, as it induces customers to shop and to participate in outdoor afternoon sports. For example, in 1984 Fortune magazine estimated that a seven-week extension of DST would yield an additional $30 million for 7-Eleven stores, and the National Golf Foundation estimated the extension would increase golf industry revenues $200 million to $300 million. Conversely, DST can adversely affect farmers and others whose hours are set by the sun. For example, grain harvesting is best done after dew evaporates, so when field hands arrive and leave earlier in summer their labor is less valuable. DST also hurts prime-time broadcast ratings and drive-in and other theaters.

Clock shifts correlate with decreased economic efficiency. In 2000 the daylight-saving effect implied an estimated one-day loss of $31 billion on U.S. stock exchanges. Clock shifts and DST rule changes have a direct economic cost, since they entail extra work to support remote meetings, computer applications and the like. For example, a 2007 North American rule change cost an estimated $500 million to $1 billion.

Public safety
In 1975 the U.S. DOT conservatively identified a 0.7% reduction in traffic fatalities during DST, and estimated the real reduction to be 1.5% to 2%,but the 1976 NBS review of the DOT study found no differences in traffic fatalities. In 1995 the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety estimated a reduction of 1.2%, including a 5% reduction in crashes fatal to pedestrians. Others have found similar reductions. Single/Double Summer Time (SDST), a variant where clocks are one hour ahead of the sun in winter and two in summer, has been projected to reduce traffic fatalities by 3% to 4% in the UK, compared to ordinary DST. It is not clear whether sleep disruption contributes to fatal accidents immediately after the spring clock shifts. A correlation between clock shifts and accidents has been observed in North America but not in Sweden. If this effect exists, it is far smaller than the overall reduction in fatalities.

In the 1970s the U.S. Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) found a reduction of 10% to 13% in Washington, D.C.'s violent crime rate during DST. However, the LEAA did not filter out other factors, and it examined only two cities and found crime reductions only in one and only in some crime categories; the DOT decided it was "impossible to conclude with any confidence that comparable benefits would be found nationwide".Outdoor lighting has a marginal and sometimes even contradictory influence on crime and fear of crime.

In several countries, fire safety officials encourage citizens to use the two annual clock shifts as reminders to replace batteries in smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, particularly in autumn, just before the heating and candle season causes an increase in home fires. Similar twice-yearly tasks include reviewing and practicing fire escape and family disaster plans, inspecting vehicle lights, checking storage areas for hazardous materials, and reprogramming.