(Wristwatch on a wrist - KIWA Staff Stock Photo)Northwest Iowa — Unless you want to be an hour early for church on Sunday morning, you should probably set your clocks back one hour before you go to bed this Saturday night. Daylight saving time ends for 2026 early Sunday morning.
Some devices such as certain electronic clocks, newer car radios, computers, smartphones, and so forth change on their own, as long as they are set to observe daylight saving time, and they’re not so old that they make the change on the wrong date.
Here in the United States, daylight saving time began over 100 years ago in 1918 with the Calder Act, which was implemented to help conserve fuel during World War I. The Uniform Time Act, which was signed in 1966 by then-President Lyndon Johnson, established a uniform daylight saving time across the country and U.S. possessions. But in 2005, President George W. Bush signed into law the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which extended daylight saving time by four weeks, beginning in 2007.
In recent years, there have been pushes by both state and national lawmakers to end all the clock switching. For instance, earlier this year, the U.S. House passed the Sunshine Protection Act, which would abolish the annual practice of springing ahead and falling back and implement permanent daylight saving time. But it stalled in the US Senate. If this legislation were to go into effect, Iowa children would board their school buses in the dark during the winter months, while the sun would go down around six o’clock in the evening at the earliest.
Of course, the other alternative would be to stay on standard time year-round. That would mean the earliest the sun would rise in Sheldon would be about 4:45 a.m. during the longest days of the year. But, a little more importantly to most people would be that those long summer nights would be an hour shorter, with the sun setting, at the latest, a few minutes after 8:00 p.m.
Again, the time will officially change back to standard at 2:00 a.m. Sunday, November 2nd, so don’t forget to fall back on Saturday night.
