Daylight Savings Time: Bad For Solar?

Cariboocoot

Because I'm in a Puckish mood ...

The bi-annual time shift that some people believe results in energy savings may instead do just the opposite. Never mind the proven difficulties with accident rates, heart attacks, and agriculture losses (animals don't like their schedules changed).

Consider this; you change the clock, you change your usage pattern relative to production. The panels stay on standard time, so to speak, because their orientation is (usually) fixed. So whereas peak production used to occur at noon standard time, it now occurs at 1:00 PM. Relative to this you use shifts.

Does it make it better or worse? Debate.

Eric L

Re: Daylight Savings Time: Bad For Solar?

Better. I shift my sleeping patterns to match clock time. So if I go to bed at 10:00 p.m. and get up at 5:00, and the panels are producing until 7:00 p.m. on DST where they would only produce to 6:00 on standard time, and if I use more power for a dark evening hour than for a dark morning hour, as I said, then I'm asking less of the batteries.

FWIW, I love DST, since I can get home from work and still do things outside; cycling, gardening, etc. That helps avoid heart-attacks too.

Cariboocoot

Re: Daylight Savings Time: Bad For Solar?

Devil's Advocate:

Schedules can be shifted without changing the clock.
Panels can be shifted without changing the clock.

waynefromnscanada

Re: Daylight Savings Time: Bad For Solar?

For me, it's better, because now I don't need my lights etc on as long after dark, production is an hour closer to my evening usage.
And for me, my system is in float before non time anyway.

Eric L

Re: Daylight Savings Time: Bad For Solar?

Schedules can be shifted without changing the clock.

Are you retired or something?

inetdog

Re: Daylight Savings Time: Bad For Solar?

Cariboocoot wrote: »

Because I'm in a Puckish mood ...
Does it make it better or worse? Debate.

Right back at you with the objection raised by dairy farmers when the idea of DST was first introduced:
"How am I going to get the cows to want to be milked an hour earlier (or later)?"
I guess the fear was that the clock change would upset them. :-)

--Puck

Cariboocoot

Re: Daylight Savings Time: Bad For Solar?

inetdog wrote: »

Right back at you with the objection raised by dairy farmers when the idea of DST was first introduced:
"How am I going to get the cows to want to be milked an hour earlier (or later)?"
I guess the fear was that the clock change would upset them. :-)

--Puck

I hate to tell you this but it does. When the shift happens dairy production drops for days. It is also a problem for knocking off work when there's still abundant light to make use of.

And consider that our days change by 10 hours from solstice to solstice whereas the closer you get to the equator the less the change is. A one hour shift is advantageous only at a limited range of latitude.

solar_dave

Re: Daylight Savings Time: Bad For Solar?

I think it won't effect my solar production!


Oh wait, AZ doesn't do DST unless your on the Federal reservation! LMAO!

icarus

Re: Daylight Savings Time: Bad For Solar?

Bottom line, I don't care. What the lock says only matters to me when I have to interact with other people. (Sandford Flemming was right, creating standrd time for the Railways, since they had to interact one train to another, and they supposedly ran on a s schedule)

In NWO we keep our time the same year round.
During daylight time, we are CDT, during standard time we are in EST. We are up with the sun in the winter, but mid summer the sun is up ~4, down (or nearly dark) by ~11. The only confusion is when we go to town (which is on Eastern time) we have to translate what time it is in town, and adjust accordingly.

Since 95% of our loading is at night, the season makes a difference, longer nights, but the clock doesn't make any diffeence to our output or loading.

Tony

inetdog

Re: Daylight Savings Time: Bad For Solar?

Cariboocoot wrote: »

I hate to tell you this but it does. When the shift happens dairy production drops for days.

But only because it effects you. If you seamlessly changed your schedule by one hour on the clock and did not get too upset by it, the cows would not notice. But since even if you try to adjust, your own routine is going to be a bit disrupted (like school hours, traffic, etc.) and even that will effect the cows.

Just be happy you are not in China, which is roughly five time zones wide and yet observes one single time across the country.

Cariboocoot

Re: Daylight Savings Time: Bad For Solar?

inetdog wrote: »

But only because it effects you. If you seamlessly changed your schedule by one hour on the clock and did not get too upset by it, the cows would not notice. But since even if you try to adjust, your own routine is going to be a bit disrupted (like school hours, traffic, etc.) and even that will effect the cows.

Nope. Change the cows' schedule and they get stressed. Go work on a dairy farm for a year and find out.

Just be happy you are not in China, which is roughly five time zones wide and yet observes one single time across the country.

And there are 24 zones around the world. The trouble comes from changing; like jet lag.

inetdog

Re: Daylight Savings Time: Bad For Solar?

Cariboocoot wrote: »

Nope. Change the cows' schedule and they get stressed. Go work on a dairy farm for a year and find out.

I think you still do not get my point. If the farm workers kept the same schedule by the sun, despite the clock change, it would not affect the cows at all. They would not realize that their schedule had suddenly changed by one hour on the clock. The farmers were saying that they would have no trouble adjusting their schedule but the cows would. If neither the cows nor the farmers changed anything but their clocks and ignored the clocks there would not be a problem.
Now if the time of sunrise suddenly changed by one hour in relation to the earth's rotation, you would definitely have jet-lagged cows. And they would not recover as quickly as people do. :-)

Cariboocoot

Re: Daylight Savings Time: Bad For Solar?

Unfortunately the farms have to interact with the rest of the community. If they didn't there would be no need to change anything.

Which of course there really isn't, as adjusting clocks twice a year is quite irrelevant to the way the world functions these days.

ggunn

Re: Daylight Savings Time: Bad For Solar?

inetdog wrote: »

Now if the time of sunrise suddenly changed by one hour in relation to the earth's rotation, you would definitely have jet-lagged cows. And they would not recover as quickly as people do. :-)

Not to mention that the change in rotational inertia would slam things around pretty hard!