How does daylight savings time save money

Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. Go Paperless with Digital. Get smart. Sign up for our email newsletter. Sign Up. Support science journalism. Knowledge awaits. Since you will likely be spending more time outside the house, program your smart thermostat accordingly. Close your shades and blinds when you are away from home to block direct sunlight from beaming in and heating up your living space.

Dishwashers consume less water per load than washing dishes by hand, 3 gallons instead of a whopping 27! Handwashing dishes can use up to 5, more gallons of water annually compared to using an Energy Star rated dishwasher. Quickly find certified, American-made dishwashers using BuildingClean. Since that time, energy usage has shifted.

Lighting, in particular, has become increasingly energy efficient in recent years, Hadley said, meaning that heating and cooling might be a bigger chunk of the electricity pie. So although the report authored by Hadley and colleagues did find energy savings for the weeks tagged on the front and back of daylight saving time, Hadley isn't so sure that the same could be said for midsummer.

In Arizona, he pointed out, daylight saving time isn't observed because the cooling needs for long summer evenings would likely overshadow any sort of savings on lighting. Latitude matters, too, Hadley said. Those extra evening hours are a lot more valuable in Montana or Maine than in Florida or Texas, which don't have as big of a difference in daylight between summer and winter. To find out more, Hadley said he'd want to look at the hour-by-hour electricity use in Indiana.

Researchers in studied monthly billing. It's people wanting to take advantage of that light time in the evening. Original article on Live Science. Stephanie Pappas is a contributing writer for Live Science covering topics from geoscience to archaeology to the human brain and behavior. Modern society, with its computers, TV-screens, and air conditioning units, uses more energy, no matter if the Sun is up or not.

Today, the amount of energy saved from DST is negligible. One of the aims of DST is to make sure that people's active hours coincide with daylight hours so that less artificial light is needed. This makes less sense close to the equator, where the amount of daylight does not vary much in a year, or near the poles, where the difference between winter and summer daylight hours is very large.