Expanded Daylight Savings period now in its second year

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Charles Perry
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After enjoying the second straight summer with additional daylight time in the evenings, Canadians and Americans will turn their clocks back an hour on Sunday morning and hunker down for the winter.

Daylight savings officially ends on Sunday at 2 a.m., with the time to be moved back an hour to 1 a.m.

All indications are that the public is happy with the move (made by both countries in 2007) to add three weeks to the daylight savings period, says Dr. Robert Douglas of Ottawa, a physicist with the time standards group for the National Research Council of Canada.

Prior to last year, the clocks were turned ahead an hour on the first Sunday in April. But in 2007, the start of Daylight Savings Time was pushed ahead two to three weeks (depending on whether it is a four or five-Sunday month) to the second Sunday in March.

As well, another week was added at the end, with Daylight Savings Time finishing last year on the first Sunday in November, instead of the last one in October.

Douglas said the saving in energy costs was one of the criteria behind the decision by the Canadian and American governments to proceed jointly with the extended Daylight Savings period.

The feeling was that the supper-time period in the late afternoon and early evening is a big consumption period for energy use with adults returning from work and their children from school. Daylight savings would provide an extra hour in which they would not have to turn on the lights.

But Douglas said he never bought into the idea of energy saving being a major factor behind the two countries' decision to expand Daylight Savings Time.

First of all, the energy conserved would not be that significant to warrant such a move, said the physicist. "If you changed all the light bulbs in your home to fluorescent, that would save you more energy than adding an extra hour of daylight."

The main reason for the move, said Douglas, was strictly a matter of convenience.

It was done because survey after survey showed that more people preferred the extra hour of daylight in the evening than in the morning. He said "morning people" who like to jog in the morning or those who work very early shifts preferred the additional hour of daylight in the morning.

"But it turns out that there are a lot more evening people than morning people," said Douglas. "And that played a much bigger role in the governments' decision to expand Daylight Savings time than energy savings."

Nonetheless, a study is currently being carried out by the U.S. Department of Energy on what savings can be realized from the decision. He said the study's findings would not likely be unveiled until some time next year.

n Charles Perry's Weather appears daily.