A New Zealander is credited with first coming up with the idea for Daylight Saving.
Your outlook should be a little bit lighter and brighter when you wake up on Sunday morning.
At 3am, clocks across Aotearoa fall back by an hour as daylight saving time begins, meaning a 7.30am wake-up will feel like 8.30am.
While it won’t be as dark when you wakeup in the morning, the sun will set an hour earlier in the evening.
Daylight saving time ends every year at 3am on the first Sunday in April – this year that falls on April 5, which is also Easter Sunday.
The twice-yearly time adjustment is a good time to check your home’s smoke alarms are in proper working order as well. Fire and Emergency New Zealand advises that every six months you should vacuum or dust your smoke alarms to help avoid false alarms.
The change to daylight saving is a good time to check smoke alarms.
Why do we observe daylight savings?
Aotearoa is among the 40% of the world who adjust their clocks seasonally to align with the Earth’s axial tilt.
Our planet’s axis of rotation is tilted 23.44°, which means that as the Earth orbits the sun, hemispheres either lean toward the sun, creating longer summer days, or away in winter which results in shorter daylight hours. To align human activity with peak daylight hours clocks are moved back to bring sunrise times earlier in the morning.
Not everyone partakes in the “spring forward, fall back” observance also known as summertime. Locations closer to the North and South poles experience greater seasonal changes in day length, making them more likely to use daylight savings than equatorial adjacent tropical regions.
Daylight saving time around the world. Photo/ Heitordp via Inkscape
Seasonal changes to timekeeping are considered a Kiwi invention. In 1895, entomologist and astronomer George Hudson presented a proposal to the Wellington Philosophical Society that clocks should be changed by two hours every spring, creating more after-hours daylight for insect collecting.
Germany was the first country to officially implement daylight savings in 1916 during World War I, an effort to make better use of daylight and conserve energy.
New Zealand first observed daylight saving time in 1927.
The dates and amounts that clocks go forward and back by have varied over the years, but Aotearoa adopted the current dates – from the last Sunday in September to the first Sunday in April – in 2007.
Proponents say benefits include energy saving and increased usable hours for leisure and recreation.
