Arizona Doesn't Change Its Clocks, But Your Lights Still Need to Know It's Winter
Here's a thing I explain a lot more than you'd think. People move here from somewhere else, they hear that Arizona doesn't do daylight saving time, and they figure that means they can set the lighting timer once and never think about it again. No springing forward, no falling back, done.
And then December shows up, they get home from work at 5:45, and the whole yard is sitting in the dark.
The clock stays put but the sun doesn't
Arizona skipping daylight saving means the clock on your microwave never jumps an hour. It doesn't do anything about the sun. In Phoenix the sun goes down around 7:40 in late June and somewhere around 5:20 in early December, so that's better than two hours of swing over the year, and it happens a few minutes at a time so nobody really notices until one evening it's just dark.
So if somebody set your timer in the summer to come on at 7:30, you've got a stretch every winter evening where it's been dark for two hours and your lights are still waiting for 7:30.
I go to a lot of houses in Chandler and Gilbert where this is exactly what's going on, and the homeowner thinks something is broken.
Winter is when you actually use the yard
This is what makes it kind of backwards out here. Back east, the dark early evenings come with snow and nobody's going outside anyway. Here, November through March is the good part of the year. It's 70 degrees at dinner time, people are firing up the fire pit and having friends over on the patio, and that's right when the lights are coming on two hours late.
So the season where you most need the yard lit after five is the season a fixed timer is most wrong.
The fix is not complicated
There are basically two ways to handle it, and the one I'd pick depends on what's already on your wall.
The first is a photocell, which is a little light sensor that turns the system on when it gets dark and doesn't care what time it is. They're cheap and they work, but they have to be mounted somewhere that actually sees the sky. I've found plenty of them tucked under an eave or behind a bush, or on the side of the house where the porch light hits them, so the lights either come on at 3 in the afternoon or never come on at all.
The second is an astronomical timer, and that's what I put on most systems now. You tell it where you are and it figures out sunrise and sunset for every day of the year by itself, and then you set it to come on at sunset and go off at whatever time you want, say 11 or midnight. Most of the Wi-Fi transformers and smart controllers have this built in, and I wrote a little about it in the post on lighting apps, because "on at sunset" turns out to be the setting people keep long after they've stopped playing with all the scenes.
If you've got one of the old dial timers with the little pins you push in, those can't do any of this. You'd have to go out every month or so and move the pins, and nobody does, so it's probably time to replace it anyway.
Permanent trim lights have the same problem
If you have Gemstone or any other permanent trim on the roofline, check the schedule in the app this time of year. It's the same deal. Set it to sunset instead of a clock time and you never have to think about it again, which matters more in November and December when the holiday scenes are going and you want the house lit when people are actually driving by after work.
If your lights have been coming on later and later and you thought something was going wrong with them, it's very likely just the timer. Go look at it tonight. If it's on a fixed clock time, either move it up to about 5:15 for the winter and remember to push it back in the spring, or switch to sunset if it can do that.
And if you've got one of the old pin timers screwed to the wall and you're tired of messing with it, we swap those out on service calls all the time, it's usually a pretty small job.
— Sam
Desert Outdoor Lighting has served the Phoenix Valley since 2004. We're licensed and bonded (ROC# 340142) and install landscape lighting and Gemstone permanent trim lighting in Gilbert, Mesa, Chandler, Scottsdale, Tempe, Queen Creek and across the Valley. Call (480) 809-7800 or request a free after-dark design visit.