Daylight Saving Time ends very early Sunday morning – 2 a.m. – so you can either delay your bedtime Saturday evening by turning all your clocks back an hour or confuse yourself Sunday morning by waking up to the wrong time. But do remember you can get an extra hour of sleep, the hour you lost in last March.
The Town of Wake Forest is urging residents to set aside an hour or so this weekend to replace the batteries in smoke alarms, flashlights and weather radios.
The next time change will be the second Sunday in March, March 11, when everyone will set their clocks ahead one hour to change to Daylight Saving Time and lose that hour of sleep.
Standard time was instituted in the U.S. and Canada by the railroads in 1883. However, it was not established in U.S. law until the Act of March 19, 1918, sometimes called the Standard Time Act. The act also established daylight saving time, which was repealed in 1919, but standard time in time zones remained in law.
During the “energy crisis” years, Congress enacted earlier starting dates for daylight time. In 1974, daylight time began on Jan. 6 and in 1975 it began Feb. 23. After those two years, the starting date reverted back to the last Sunday in April. In 1986, a law was passed that shifted the starting date of daylight time to the first Sunday in April, beginning in 1987. The ending date of daylight time was not subject to such changes, and remained the last Sunday in October.
The Energy Policy Act of 2005 changed both the starting and ending dates. Under the new law, Daylight Saving Time begins three weeks earlier than before, on the second Sunday in March, and is extended by one week to the first Sunday in November. The new start and stop dates began in March 2007.
