If we save daylight, is that a credit or a debit in the energy books ?

I have just been changing light bulbs.

Again.

It's part of the Sunday morning ritual due to the fact that the electrics in our house appear to be haunted. We had an electrician around to look at it and the shrugging of the shoulders and the evasiveness of his answers (as related by my wife) are a dead giveaway for the supernatural influence. Light bulbs in our house just lose the will to live. The murky light that we live in half the time certainly creates the kind of eldritch atmosphere that spirits clearly prefer.

In an effort to reduce the energy footprint of our family (We have teenagers who are, I think, trying to make our house visible from space) I am replacing incandescent with fluorescent at every opportunity. Wife did her bit by coming back from a visit to Daughter No. 1 in Wagga Wagga with a clutch of energy efficient fluoros given to her personally by Al Gore, who happened to be visiting that weekend.

Some notes of explanation to my foreign reader are needed (Howdy - you appear to be in Houston by the little red dot on the map) :

1. I was kidding about Al Gore
2. I was not kidding about Wagga Wagga. There really is such a place. GoogleEarth it if you don't believe it. The name is aboriginal for "the farthest I can be from anywhere and still be somewhere"
3. Wagga Wagga is in the state of New South Wales (NSW) whereas we live in Western Australia (WA). They are two hours ahead of us most of the year and three hours when we don't have daylight saving (and boy is THAT another story).

Time is a very funny thing, even without Stephen Hawking to explain just how funny it is, but even he didn't tackle the thorny issue of daylight saving. I have tried to explain it to my dear wife on several occasions, with and without recourse to quantum mechanics. She just doesn't get it. Energy saving light bulbs are all very well and certainly replacing two hours daylight with two hours 75 W fluoro light must be making a huge impact. But do you think I could get dear wife to undersand that using light bulbs from Wagga Wagga in Perth means that they are going to switch off two hours too early ? No ! Irish women are just so stubborn.

Tot Morgen