Blackle - Does it Really Save Energy?

Does Blackle save power? Real World Green uses Kill A Watt meter to answer the question. Distributed by Tubemogul.

Video Transcription

Hey everyone, I am Eric Rochow and this is Real World Green. Today's episode is going to be about Blackle. Blackle is a new website that has kind of been buzzing around, and I got a couple of emails, people asking me about it. I thought I would address the big question of Blackle is, whether Blackle really saves energy or not? What is Blackle? Blackle is a website created by a company called Media Heap, and it was not created by Google. It does use the Google search engine. I mean, any website can do that using Google Custom Search. The idea behind Blackle is that -- the thinking is, a computer screen that is black or dark consumes less electricity than a computer screen that is white or bright. In other words, you are having to make the screen bright, kind of like turning up a light bulb, and that takes more energy than a completely black screen. I looked out on the web and I found a website called www.triplepundit.com. Its a blog and they have a Ask Pablo column occasionally. I read some interesting things about it. What it said was, that in the CRT world, in other words, the Cathode Ray Tube kind of monitor, in other words, older computer monitors that looks like an older TV screen. They are glass, they are not the LCD screens, this does happen; a bright CRT monitor takes more energy than a dark CRT monitor. The problem with this is, is 75% of the world's computers now use LCD monitors or LED monitors. I don't know, I will fix that part. But anyway, they don't use CRT monitors. So now that I have confused myself and maybe you guys about LCD and LED monitors, I was wondering. does Blackle really save energy? So what we did was we just went down to the office and we got one of the LCD monitors we have and we pulled out our trusted kilowatt meter here, and we plugged it in. So first we went to the Google page, and we looked and saw what the kilowatt meter was saying. Then we went to the Blackle page, and we saw what the kilowatt meter said. I thought it was very interesting that the kilowatt meter said, the Blackle page took one more watt of energy than the Google page for an LCD monitor. So in that sense, Blackle doesn't work. For CRT monitors, those are the kind of monitors that have a glass computer screen, the older style, it does save energy. But I think in the bigger picture I like what Blackle does. So regardless of whether Blackle will help you save energy because you don't have the right kind of monitor, they do cause you to think, and let me read a little thing that they have on their About page of the website. Blackle was created by Heap Media to remind us all of the need to take small steps in our everyday lives to save energy. They continue. We believe that there is value in the concept, because even if the energy savings are small, they all add up. Secondly, we feel that seeing Blackle every time we load our web browser reminds us that we need to keep taking small steps to save energy. I really believe that. So in that way Blackle succeeds whether you have a CRT monitor or an LCD monitor. They basically got a lot of people to stop and think about those small things in their lives that consume energy, and if hundreds of thousands or millions of people take those same steps, that's a big savings, and I think that's great. So that's Real World Green for this week. Send us an email, give us some comments. If you have some show ideas, we would love to here from them. Please tell your friends about the show and enjoy your day. I will see you later.