It's That Time Again--Change Your Clocks

It's that time: The official change from daylight saving to standard time happens at 2 a.m. Sunday. Yes, you’ll lose an hour’s sleep but you’ll get it back in the fall.

The best way to avoid being an hour behind everyone else Sunday morning is to set your clock ahead one hour on Saturday night. Thanks to electronics, many devices, such as computers and TV boxes, will reset themselves.

If it seems as if the time changeover is coming earlier than in the past, you’re right. Starting in1986, daylight saving time ran from the first Sunday in April until the last Sunday in October. In 2005, President George W. Bush signed an energy bill which extended daylight saving by four weeks, beginning three weeks earlier and ending one week later. The law changed the daylight saving calendar to begin on the second Sunday in March and end on the first Sunday in November.

Readers wishing to set the precise time can visit the official U.S. Time Clock, which is maintained by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and its military counterpart, the U. S. Naval Observatory (USNO).

Fire departments also use the changeover to encourage people to replace batteries in their smoke and carbon monoxide detectors.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) estimates there was a yearly average of 386,300 residential fires resulting in nearly 2,400 deaths between 2006 and 2008.  Two-thirds of fire deaths occur in homes where there are no smoke alarms or no working smoke alarms.

CPSC estimates there was an annual average of 183 unintentional non-fire CO poisoning deaths associated with consumer products between 2006 and 2008.