There’s word that the new President Trump could push to do away with Daylight Savings time. What would that look like in Idaho? Also, is having a “standard” time all it’s cracked up to be?
What's Daylight Savings Time Like in Idaho?
I’ve been hearing rumblings in the media that our new president might make moves to abolish Daylight Savings time. Sure… I’m interested. The twice-a-year routine of changing sleep habits and trying to remember which clocks I reset and which ones I didn’t would come to an end… but what would that look like here in the Treasure Valley? But first, prompting this topic was an opinion piece by Jeffrey Tucker that I found.
Tucker went into the history of time-keeping in America… very interesting stuff. From how the railroad companies insisted on more standardized time for their train schedules to how every town set their clocks to noon when the sun was at its highest… this is called “solar time”. You can find out what your solar time is right this minute at the MySolarTime website.
Maybe someday there will be a push to return humans to “solar time”… for health reasons, perhaps. It’s not as crazy at it might seem at first. But when things do have to be coordinated from one part of the world with another (for Zoom calls or airline flights), there is already a way to do that; it’s called Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). You can find out YOUR UTC at the TimeAndDate website.
But what about Idaho? What does not having Daylight Savings time do for us? In case you didn’t know, Idaho is in two different time zones now. The northern part of the state is on Pacific time while the southern part, including the Treasure Valley, is on Mountain time. While there are the official times for sunrise and sunset, there are also dawn and dusk times where we do have some sunlight but old Sol isn’t technically on the job yet. This is called “Twilight” and the brightest part of Twilight is called “Civil Twilight”. During this time, you can do stuff outside without needing artificial light.
In the Treasure Valley, on the “shortest” day of the year when Winter starts… when we have the least amount of daylight… our sunrise is at 8:15 am and sunset at 5:11 pm. Because we are not in Daylight Savings time in the winter, these are the real times… even if Trump can do away with Daylight Savings. Then figure in “Civil Twilight” and you get the “feel-like” times for our winter scenario; sunrise of 7:42 am and sunset of 5:44 pm.
Summer in the Treasure Valley, on our “longest” day, with Daylight Savings time, sees our sunrise at 6:03 am and sunset at 9:29 pm. The “feel like” with the Civil Twilight figured in is at 5:27 am sunrise and at 10:05 pm sunset. A couple of things that gives us this great window of daylight is that we are further north than much of the rest of the country AND we, in the Treasure Valley, are very near the western edge of the Mountain time zone. The eastern edge of our time zone is in the middle of Nebraska and it gets dark there much earlier.
Treasure Valley Dave's Thoughts
IF we do away with Daylight Savings time, our summer would look like this; our sunrise would feel like 4:27 am with the actual sunrise of 5:03 am. The end of the day would feel like 9:05 pm with the actual sunset of 8:29 pm.
On the other hand, if we kept Daylight Savings all year round, then our winters would have a feel like sunrise of 8:42 am with the real sunrise of 9:15 am. Our winter sunsets would feel like 6:44 pm with the real sunset of 6:11 pm.
What do YOU think? Keep things as they are; keep Daylight Savings all the year; or dump Daylight Savings altogether? I think if we did away with it, our summers here would be even more awesome because the temps would start to cool down earlier in the evening. Our summers here are pretty awesome anyway… and if YOU would like to experience next summer living here in the Treasure Valley, get busy and give Mareen and me a call and let’s help YOU get that better quality of life!!
