The date and what actually happens
In the early hours of Sunday 25 October 2026, at three in the morning on the Spanish mainland, the clocks go back to two. You get an extra hour in bed and it gets dark an hour earlier.
Your phone, your computer and most televisions adjust themselves. Everything else in the house does not.
Automatic irrigation is the most annoying one
An irrigation controller still on summer time waters an hour later than you think. In October it hardly matters, but the adjustment gets forgotten and carries through to June, and then the watering lands in full sun with half of it evaporating.
It is also the moment to cut the frequency. With October temperatures and the first rain, most gardens around here need considerably less water than they are getting.
The pool plant
The filtration timer keeps its own clock, and on many older models it is mechanical and drifts on its own. While you are at it, check it and cut the daily hours: in winter, with active wintering, two to four hours is usually enough.
Filtering for eight hours in November improves nothing and shows up on the electricity bill.
Outdoor lighting, blinds and the thermostat
Outdoor lighting on an astronomical timer adjusts itself. Lighting on a fixed timer does not: from 25 October it will come on an hour late, and in an urbanisation that means a stretch of driveway in the dark.
Motorised blinds with a schedule and the heating thermostat are in the same position. And the thermostat has an extra reason to be touched now: it is the moment to move to a genuine winter setting, not just a winter clock.
The devices nobody remembers
The oven, the microwave, the fridge with a display, the alarm, the doorbell camera, the clock in the car asleep in the garage. None of them is serious, and all of them end up showing the wrong time until March if it is not done in one go.
Ten minutes on Sunday morning, list in hand, and you stop thinking about it.
