Daylight savings ends tonight, but do we even need it?

IT STUFFS up our body clock and freaks us out twice a year. But is there actually any benefit to daylight savings?

Photos of the light level at the Cairns Esplanade Lagoon at 7pm on Friday the 27th December for Daylight Savings feature in the Sunday Mail. The Lagoon at 7pm. Picture: Mclean Stewart

YOU forgot to change the time, your alarm goes off and you’re late for work. You’ve missed an hour’s sleep that your brain thinks you should have had and everything just sucks. But do we need all this?

Firstly, make sure you remember that daylight savings swaps over at 3am overnight (Saturday night/Sunday morning). It will also go backwards. So this is the change where you actually get an hour extra in your day.

TOP QUESTIONS OF THE 1ST INNINGS: Daylight Savings, Murder, Powerplay, No. of overs, Pancakes #CWC15 #AUSvNZ pic.twitter.com/VsSVrA1pAj

— Google Australia NZ (@googledownunder) March 29, 2015

Your smartphone won’t need to be adjusted to get the right time either. So don’t worry about frantically messaging your friends in the morning to work out what the time is. Your phone will be right.

So why do we have daylight savings?

Some train timetable apps were an hour behind after daylight savings ended.

The idea itself is almost 250 years old, reportedly suggested by Benjamin Franklin himself. However, it wasn’t introduced until World War I by the Germans to save coal during the war. During both the first and second World War all Australian states had daylight savings. We then picked up daylight savings permanently in 1968 in Tasmania and 1971 in the rest of the country, minus Queensland and Western Australia.

For years now though, experts have said that daylight savings doesn’t save money or energy. The idea that it does save energy stems from the assumption that lighter evenings mean that there will be a lower demand for artificial light and electricity.

An American study in 2008 found that while lighting demand did in fact drop, the extra warmer hour of sunlight in the evening resulted in people using their air conditioning more. That not only equalled the amount of energy used without daylight savings, but exceeded it.