As the clocks go back...

Date: 31/10/2011

As the darker nights draw in, and getting up in the morning gets that little bit harder every day, on Saturday night it was time to turn back the clocks making the morning commute a little lighter, and giving us all an ‘extra’ hour in bed. Although almost everyone knows that the clocks ‘fall back’ in the autumn and ‘spring forward’ in March not many people know why we actually do it every year.

 

The idea of ‘daylight savings time’ was first started in New Zealand when George Vernon Hudson decided that he wanted more daylight time after work to enjoy his leisure activities. However, it wasn’t until 1916 that it was widely adopted, as the Germans and their allies decided to use it to conserve coal during wartime, and other countries quickly followed suit.

 

Nowadays, we don’t do it to conserve coal; but the winter, of course, still has a substantial effect on our energy consumption. The cold weather means we have our heating on more, and the lack of natural light gets us reaching for our light switches at home and at work.

 

All of this extra electricity that we use doesn’t need to have a huge impact on the environment or on our wallets. By using low-energy light bulbs you use just one fifth of the energy of a traditional incandescent light bulb, and low-energy versions can last up to ten times longer than a normal bulb so you’ll have to replace the bulbs less frequently!

So this winter, make sure that the next time you’re in the supermarket you go for a low-energy light bulb that’s better for the environment and your energy bills, and remember to recycle those low-energy light bulbs!

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