[oztrailrider]

There is a better way to save electricity than by using a black version of google, while it does seem to make a small difference according to the article below it seems to be much more beneficial to simply turn the brightness of your LCD monitor down. I came across this piece of information in a review of home power meters here: http://www.dansdata.com/quickshot041.htm.

As I explained in the letters column, the 30-inch Dells like my 3007WFP-HC may have a 147 watt power rating, but that only applies when they're running at their rather painful maximum brightness. You don't need - or even want - your monitor to be that bright if you're not using it in a very bright environment; it's just burning watts and straining your eyes for no gain at all.

In my office, I run my monster Dell at its minimum brightness.

At this minimum brightness, my new power meter reckoned my monitor was consuming only seventy-something watts, depending on what was displayed on the screen. An all-black screen was somewhere between 67 and 70 watts; an all-white one was about 77.

Winding the brightness up to maximum boosted the all-black power consumption to 133 watts, with an all-white screen now consuming 142.

Even if these numbers aren't very accurate, it's still clear that the power to be saved by using darker screen colours, or the silly "Blackle" black-Google site, is completely dwarfed by the power you can save by running your monitor at a lower, and probably ergonomically superior, brightness. It doesn't hurt to save the single-digit watts that darker screen colours can achieve, but the difference between the most I could make the monitor draw at minimum brightness and the least it drew at maximum brightness is more than fifty watts.

A heavy computer user could easily save a hundred kilowatt-hours a year just by doing this. That's not actually going to save you a whole lot of money unless your local electricity tariffs are unusually high, but it's nonetheless a quite impressive amount of energy.