Blackle Searches, Kind of Saves Energy, LCDs and Planet Earth

Jesus Diaz — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 12:36:51 +0000

Probably all the US treehuggers ignored this but yesterday there was an international call for a five-minute blackout to save some watts and call attention to the staggering energy consumption on the planet. Too little you say? Try Blackle, a non-official version of Google, which claims to have saved 307,326 Watt hours by using a black background instead of the classic white. Anything that may save some cents from my bill and minutes from my monitor life is welcome, but is this real?

AU: The guys at Techlogg tested 27 monitors and found absolutely no power saving on flat panels. There was a genuine saving on CRTs, but not the 15 watts the site claims. Techlogg averaged 10 watts. So if you’re on a CRT, bookmark it. If not, ignore it. -SB

Since there are all kinds of display technologies and sizes out there it will be extremely difficult to measure the savings that this kind of trick may gave you. Since most LCDs use lamps that are always on, you probably will be saving a lot more energy by reducing the brightness of your monitor. Probably this will change with LED-backlighting. What do you think? Could this be a real saver or just silly? [Blackle]

Gizmodo Australia » blackle

Blackle Searches, Kind of Saves Energy, LCDs and Planet Earth