doug wick

The recent move toward consumer environmentalism is all about us doing the little things to cut energy consumption – changing our lightbulbs out, recycling, hypermiling. Unfortunately, with any lifestyle trend there is born a group of questionable businesses that seek to make a quick buck off of our efforts to do the right thing.

Enter Blackle, the new website that is basically Google with a black screen (the developers of the site use Google on the back end) that claims to save energy by not projecting the all white background of the traditional Google screen. Your monitor saves energy, it adds up, etc. It’s like turning the lights off at home – it saves power. Logical, right?

Google responds recently saying that Blackle is a sham and that in many cases it actually takes more power to display a black website. This test from Techlogg seems to confirm that if you have less than a 22-inch LCD monitor – which most of us do – Blackle actually uses more power. Nice. But if you have a CRT monitor (apparently 25% of the market still has them) Blackle saves power, though it’s not that much, and certainly not what they claim.

Blackle was developed by Heap Media, a company founded in 2005 and “committed to developing and growing leading online services with global reach.” They have five other websites listed, including such “hits” as Calorifica, Red Ruby, and Mikibo. Strangely, ALL of them have bright white backgrounds (no not even grey, or tan). Calorifica is particularly ironic.

Of course, no one probably visits those other sites so we don’t really need to worry about their environmental impact. Techlogg suggests some other, more legitimate ways of saving power while using your computer.

Note to regular readers: I know the wicksite posts have been a bit sparse lately. I have something big in my personal life I’ve been working on that has been soaking up the blog time. I promise to come back swinging when that dies down!