2015 - Articles
BACK TO WINTER TIME
Speakers
by Nicolas Roy, VELUX Group
This weekend, remember to move your clock back and enjoy that extra hour of sleep on Sunday!
The last weekend of October is the time when we say goodbye to daylight savings time (DST) or summer time. The concept of daylight saving is dating back to 1895 and was first proposed by New Zealander George Hudson, and implemented for the first time by Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1916. Many more countries have started to use the concept since then, especially since the 1970s’ energy crisis.
The idea behind daylight savings time is to extend the length of daytime during the summer period in the evening, a practice intended to reduce the use of incandescent lighting and thus reduce electricity use in homes, but modern lighting fixtures and heating/cooling usage differ greatly nowadays and research on how DST affects energy use is limited or contradictory.
A similar practice can be traced back ancient times and civilizations whom adjusted the length of the days and hours according to the different seasons of the year – where each days were divided in twelve hours, with longer hours in the summer period than the winter period to account for the difference in length of daytime. Yes… they had a great take on it!
