Well, most all of us (in the US anyways) made the switch to Standard Time in the wee hours this morning. It’s not a big deal to our diabetes routine but this graphic reminds that it is a man-made change that makes no natural sense.
*Loop users: use the Loop app software (not the pump directly!) to make the pump time change: Settings>Pump>Change Time Zone.
Complete agreement, in that I think we should make the healthier choice and choose Standard Time, all the time. At a minimum, we should remove the change in clocks, but sadly, there is a strong push among politicians for permanent DST, and I fear being stuck with a bad choice.
Perhaps we could split the difference and make a one time 30 minute change and be done with it. We have allowed man-made contrivances a part of our life for a long time, since we started keeping track of our day with a clock!
I think a permanent change to Standard Time makes good sense.
It seems like there is no way to fix this if you’re using AAPS and Dash pods. I knew it was coming because of the commentary on the Facebook group, but it’s annoying. It suspends the loop for 3 hours.
When I woke up, there were tons of alerts on the screen and less than ideal numbers (have to change all my settings because insurance suddenly denied a script that had been very helpful), but the time had corrected on the Pod and the loop had resumed. The funny thing is, I don’t see any anomalies in the data. No double line between 1-2am, no weird data leaps. I’m very curious how Xdrip or AAPS handled the overlapping data.
Daylight savings time definitely needs to go. Or at the very least pumps and software should be running off of UTC. It’s just asinine to screw with the time and have software dependent on the time.
@Robyn_H Thanks for adding the AAPS and Dash pod Loop perspective. A three hour loss of Loop activity is not ideal. It’s kind of like another sensor restart; at least you retained all the data.
I’ve no experience with Xdrip or AAPS, so I can’t answer your overlapping data question. Perhaps someone else can add that.
I had a great overlap. I love these awesome crazy things that happen.
Totally agree - This is one reason I have never gone on the pump and stay MDI. Until Covid, every 3 weeks I would go to my offices in China and India for 3 weeks and then return to the East coast. Criss crossing the International date line was hell to deal with in any electronics that didn’t self adjust. Going UTC would be a great start.
If you look under the hood at a Clarity CSV export, you’ll see that thr G6 internally tracks its time continuously as seconds since transmitter first power-on.
I’ve never changed mine for DST. Its just been an hour off for months. Now it is self corrected. Yah!
I use my pump to tell time. I have to change mine. What me buy a watch? No way.
Almost everything makes automatic adjustments. My car clock and my phone and computer.
Only my pump and my microwave require me to adjust it.
My wife adjusts me often. Usually with that look. Yeah you know it.
We go to permanent DST and shift our schedules an hour in the winter. Or even use just one time zone like China. Then folks in Guam would get up and go to work at 10 PM. Point is that keeping time with numbers is artificial.
DST is medium deal with me. I shift the time on my pump in increments over a few days, so that my insulin isn’t suddenly out of sync with way my body is operating. Ditto for crossing 1-2 time zones.
My basal rates are not so different from hour to hour that it would make much difference when the time changes.
At 1:am I’m pumping 0.9 per hour and it’s the same at 2:am. But at 3 am I switch to a whopping 1.0 per hour.
There is no way my body is going to notice that difference
I travel for business quite a lot. I make time adjustments to my pump but I do that because of blousing times etc.
The biggest difference between basal rates for me is 0.2.
So it wouldn’t matter what the pump clock says. At night I need a little less insulin, so yes it would matter if I’m 3 hours off but not that much
@Timothy – You make a good point that the net effect of a 25-hour or a 23-hour day with the affected time at 2 am doesn’t really make much difference to us. It’s just needlessly adding another complication to the list of 42 factors that affect our blood sugar.
I’d sure think it makes good sense for many reasons to stop making this schedule change twice each year.
In WWII all aspects of Germany operated on Berlin time, no matter where they were. So all U-boats no matter where were on one time. All embassy’s operated on Berlin time. It led to a good deal of confusion.
This PBS video shows the history and justification of the current time-changing situation. It also makes a persuasive health case for switching to a single unchanging system – to Standard Time that is.
One of points it raised was the recognition that consistent exposure to early daylight plays a vital role in synching our bodies so that we sleep well every night.
I have embraced this phenomenon effectively by using a 10,000 lux light and exposing my eyes to this light every morning. True, it is an unnatural work-around, but it is a tactic that works since it is in tune with the circadian preference of the natural body. A daily early morning walk could accomplish the same thing. My sleep has markedly improved with this daily early day-light morning exposure.
This video makes a strong case for switching to permanent Standard Time.
We do know that good sleep helps produce good glycemia.
