Change Google's Background Color To Save Energy?

i_like_spam writes "Recent commentary at Nature Climate Change describes an on-going debate about the energy savings associated with the background colors used by high-traffic websites such as Google and the NYTimes. A back of the envelope calculation has suggested energy savings of 750 Megawatt hours per year if Google switched their background from white to black. In response, a new version of Google called Blackle was created. However, other calculations by the Wall Street Journal suggest minimal energy savings."

Oh, the irony....

[mark-t (151149)]

A site that criticizes google for having a light background itself uses a light background.

Re:

[Don_dumb (927108)]

I think that is hypocritical as opposed to ironic.
But it is a good point, that site decided to use a white background, why? Is there some simple asthetic reason why a site would choose white or lighter colours over dark?
Or is it even simpler than that and no one has actually stopped to think about that.

Re:Oh, the irony....

[Propaganda13 (312548)]

My informal research (if you want to call it that)

White background is more professional looking. It is also easier to read text in a large variety of colors.
Black background is more "cool" orientated - gaming sites, etc. It is easier on the eyes as long as the text color stands out and font size is large enough.

Black background in Porn too!

[TWX (665546)]

I found that porn sites use mostly black backgrounds with light (usually pink) text. I've committed this research for over thirteen years, and I consider myself something of an expert on the subject...

Re:Oh, the irony....

[Otto (17870)]

Black background with bright letters is NOT easier on the eyes. I prefer white background because I dont have burned white lines on my eyes after reading.

Oh, you are so, so wrong.

Firstly, if you're using a CRT all day with a white background, then you have an electron beam lighting up phosphors and thus beaming light straight at your eyes all the time you're looking at it. It's like staring directly at a light bulb if you have to use the PC for any length of time.

Secondly, if you're using an LCD, it's likely backlit by a very bright bulb. "White" means opening the LCD molecules and letting that light through. So, in fact, you ARE staring at a light bulb when looking at a white LCD screen.

Computers Screens are not paper. They have light coming from them and hitting your eyes.
Paper products have light reflected off of them, usually at much lower intensity to start with.

So reading dark letters on light backgrounds is fine for paper.
But on a TV Screen, it's *provably* better for your eyes to have dark backgrounds and light lettering. If this hurts your eyes, use wider fonts instead of razor thin lettering.

Re:Oh, the irony....

[Yetihehe (971185)]

Why freaks?. This means there are 10 types of people... those who like bright background and those who like dark background. So it's just a matter of liking.

Re:Oh, the irony....

[KiloByte (825081)]

Yeah, but only one of these schemes is The Right One.

And judging from your heretical approach to this matter, I guess you may even use Emacs. Eew.

Re:Oh, the irony....

[nicolastheadept (930317)]

Yeah you're right, light grey on dark grey is good too: http://support.steampowered.com/ [steampowered.com] is a good example

Re:WHY IT GOTTA BE BLACK!??!!

[hwojtek (244736)]

I belive black would turn down the power usage on a CRT, but LCD running white (no voltage applied to the cells, so no dimming) uses less energy... Or am I wrong?

Re: LCDs consume more power to create black

[DataSpring (757974)]

Exactly what I was thinking! (The way LCD's produce black is to energize all the pixels that need to be black, "illuminating" them, which makes them opaque, and "get in the way" of the backlight, which is always on.) So, this would effectively *increase* the power consumption of LCD monitors, which are more prevalent everyday, and probably the majority of monitor sales these days.

Re: LCDs consume MORE power to create black

[arete (170676)]

mod parent up, a lot.

The article references a DOE article from decades ago - and clearly before the predominance of LCDs - and another article full of comments about how the tests didn't bear this out on LCDs.

And if you REALLY want to save money on your CRTs, this is small potatoes compared to having a power strip for you monitor so you can cut all power to it at night - modern CRTs have a very substantial residual drain to keep the heater warm.

And you can set your machine to monitor-off earlier than sleeping - and since it wakes up from this fast, there aren't a lot of downsides. (This helps CRTs and LCDs...)

Finally, in many LCDs you can simply turn down the backlight - this is generally the largest power component in an LCD.

Re: LCDs consume more power to create black

[camperdave (969942)]

So the black background might make your monitor warm up, but it won't use any additional energy.

Of course it will. It takes power to twist the liquid crystals to make black, power that is not applied to make white. The backlighting isn't the issue. Even the original poster mentioned that the backlight is on constantly.

Re:WHY IT GOTTA BE BLACK!??!!

[AlecC (512609)]

You are right, as actually tested by a colleague using a power meter. With his normal, mostly white, desktop - 26W. Unplug the video so the monitor goes into "No Signal", which this particular monitor did not timeout - 28W. Not a great difference, but definitely going the opposite way to TFA.

double entendre

[User 956 (568564)]

A back of the envelope calculation has suggested energy savings of 750 Megawatt hours per year if Google switched their background from white to black. In response, a new version of Google called Blackle was created.

Once Google has gone Black, they'll never go back. That's what I hear, anyway.

Re:

[Corporate Troll (537873)]

Can't we go to the middle ground and let Google go Asian? Asians are way hotter than Whites and Blacks.

Of course, I wouldn't know how to implement that, but damn, they're Google, they're going to find a way!

On the other hand, we're talking about energy savings and global warming, so perhaps having a "hotter homepage" is going to be counterproductive.

Re:double entendre

[yoyhed (651244)]

Can't we go to the middle ground and let Google go Asian?

Of course, I wouldn't know how to implement that

Umm... "body bgcolor=#FFFF00" ?

Black background?

[John Betonschaar (178617)]

I wonder how much of the 'energy saved' will be consumed by all those machines they use in the hospital for people who get eye problems from staring at white/grey on black text.

Also, You'd think changing your desktop background to solid black would make more of a difference then just changing google. I spent at most 10 minutes a day with the Google page open. And it's not that there's no other site that uses a white background. How much energy do flashing ads consume btw?

Re:Black background?

[Asmodai (13932)]

From what I remember reading in some research is that a light grey text on a black background actually produces one of the best readable displays for your eyes.

Anyway, interesting read: http://www.writer2001.com/colwebcontrast.htm [writer2001.com]

Re:Black background?

[TheLink (130905)]

I would think a nonbright monochromatic colour (say dark/medium green) on black would be better than grey on black. Then you don't get chromatic aberration even if you have crappy eye wear/lenses.

BUT, nowadays lots of things are multicoloured anyway and the text is often next to pictures as the article you linked mentions. Having pictures in a mostly black screen might be more "jarring".

Only applicable for CRTs

[advocate_one (662832)]

TFT backlights are still on even if entire page is white text on black... they only go off when energy savings kick in and turn the display off.

Re:

[tom17 (659054)]

In a decade or two it will probably all be e-ink based so there will be no difference. Except it would need to be illuminated in the dark.

Unless they make a hybrid with oled in the dark and e-ink in the light. Then a light background would waste electricity at night and strain your eyes more.

So have a dark background at night and a light background during the day like reading paper, that's it, web pages that adjust their display depending upon your surroundings.

Maybe I should have kept that to myself...

Re:Only applicable for CRTs

[MrNaz (730548)]

Apparently people who can spell correctly are also a dying breed.

Mod me down and prove me right.

Re:Only applicable for CRTs

[Detritus (11846)]

Thread makers are a dyeing breed.

Re:Only applicable for CRTs

[lemaymd (801076)]

I have a power meter attached to my computer/screen combo. When I visit blackle in full-screen mode, it uses ~.5 watts less electricity than Google, and my screen consumes about 20W total.

silly

[Gabest (852807)]

lcds have a backlight, it only covers the light for black, it won't save any energy.

Re:

[cerberusss (660701)]

No, indeed, this will bring lots of extra costs as well. The black background will push many, many slashdotters into the abyss of depression. To counter this, they will flee into light therapy and burn up many gigawatts of healthy light.

Re:silly

[TheLink (130905)]

Some LCDs have dynamic backlights. So if they are displaying something dark they dim the backlight down.

So when comparing the contrast of LCD displays find out whether contrast ratio are measured the same way.
e.g. whether it's dynamic or static.

Whether it's the ratio of the brightest white vs the darkest black AT THE SAME time on about the same part of the screen (some can dim different parts of the screen to try to suit the dark bits of the picture),
or it's the ratio of the brightest white now vs darkest black 1 minute ago - no adjustments of brightness levels.
or even the ratio of the brightest white the monitor can display, vs the darkest black the monitor can display when on, with adjustments allowed (really cheating :) ).

Re:silly

[deragon (112986)]

Sorry to correct you, but the temperature of the room will practically not change, unless the LCD faces a window.

If the LCD background is white, the light will eventually hit an object of your office and most of it will be absorbed. By absorbed, we mean converted to heat. The remaining light will be reflected to another object that will absorb again. And this continues until there is no more light.

Only light escaping your office through a window will prevent increase. Granted, because of reflection, there will be more light of the LCD that will eventually hit a window when using a white background than a black one, but for practical purposes, the quantity of energy lost will be very, very small. As a percentage of total energy lost to heat, the difference between using a white background versus a black background will be minuscule.

As a rule, no energy is created nor lost. And most forms of energy degrade as heat.

Slashdotters, take notice

[archeopterix (594938)]

PLEASE USE BOLD AND UPPERCASE IN YOUR COMMENTS. A +5 COMMENT IN BOLD AND UPPERCASE SAVES 5 DONKEY-FORTHNIGHTS OF THE ENERGY

Re:Slashdotters, take notice

[by Anonymous Coward]

Anything with the word "Donkey-fortnight" gets past the lameness filter

Re:Slashdotters, take notice

[sqldr (838964)]

How on earth did you get that through the lamness filter?

It was conserving energy.

This is pretty much nonsense

[grahamtriggs (572707)]

The vast majority of people run LCD monitors these days. For the most part they run with a backlight of constant brightness - so there is no energy saving with a black screen.

Only if the LCD detects a dark screen, and adaptively lowers the backlight, will there be any energy saving.

Ok, how about

[archeopterix (594938)]

The vast majority of people run LCD monitors these days. For the most part they run with a backlight of constant brightness - so there is no energy saving with a black screen.

Poor excuse for not saving teh energy. Just use bloogle AND switch to CRT. Or else the whales will die!

Re:This is pretty much nonsense

[1u3hr (530656)]

The vast majority of people run LCD monitors these days.

No they don't. The majority of monitors sold surely, but monitors last for many years. Mine is over 10 years old, and has survived three or four PCs. There are a lot of old systems and even older monitors in use.

Re:This is pretty much nonsense

[phoenix321 (734987)]

If you compare the energy consumption of CRTs and LCDs in everyday use, you'll find astounding results. Or perhaps not so astounding, as the CRT is sucking 150W or more, while your LCD consumes less than 40W - or 60W if you've got a larger screen.

Now you know why many companies are throwing out / have thrown out long ago their CRTs and why it's dumb to pick them up for even less than 10 dollars: larger CRTs may be cheap to buy, but they eat into your wallet through 2-3 years. For fellow geeks who use their computer for 10 hours a day, that's some serious cash burned per year. And baby seals and pet whales killed, of course.

Most decent notebooks use 40W-60W total when under load, while older desktops routinely have PSUs that eat 30W in the *off*-state (computer powered down, but cable plugged in). A wattmeter ($15) and a calculator ($5) can do so much more for your wallet (and those pooooooooor baby seals) than switching to CF lamps and changing the background of that damn CRT to black.

Common energy hogs in the average home (in case you haven't taken care of some of these already)

- the fridge. There are models that use 140kwh per year available, yours probably uses 300 or more
- the freezer. same here, but when upgrading, consider a top-opening freezer. As cold air stays down, it's much more energy conserving than front-opening models
- lighting: use CFLs wherever convenient and LED replacements where there's not enough room for CFLs or switching cycles are important

But those are costing money. Here are some savings for free:
- the VCR, radio or TV: some waste 15-20W or more for doing nothing than blinking 12:00 - get a e-meter and a power strip with a simple on/off switch.
- washer and dryer: these appliances sometimes waste 20W or more when just being plugged in. Mine does and it's not a cheap one, either. That's right, 20W energy drain for nothing, no clock, no blinkenlights, nothing, just the plug in the socket. E-meter and then pull the plug when not using them, problem solved.
- the desktop PC. As mentioned above, most PSUs use 35W for nothing when the computer is supposedly in the off-state. The same for some peripherals, although they use 5-10W at most. Switchable power strip takes care of that - and have all peripherals plugged together so one switch really turns them all off: powered USB-hub, printer, scanner, speaker, screen and everyting else.

Total cost: 3 switchable power strips for $3 each and an e-meter ($15). Savings in the first year almost $100 or more, convenience and standard of living lost: zero.

No savings on LCD:s

[Depili (749436)]

As TFT displays seem to be more common than CRT:s nowadays, the energy savings are minimal to non-existent, as the TFT backlight won't get turned off...

Re:No savings on LCD:s

[TheThiefMaster (992038)]

In fact don't TFTs use marginally more energy to display black?

Depends on the kind

[Sycraft-fu (314770)]

TN+Film ones, by far the most common, do. They have to be energised to go black, their no power state is open which is why the pixels fail to white. VA (P-MVA, S-PVA and so on) and IPS (S-IPS and such) don't because their no power state is black and have to be energised to open and thus fail to black.

Regardless the energy used on the panels isn't much in comparison to the backlight. That's why companies toy with reflective displays (like the old Game Boy Advances). It does really well for battery life when there's not a backlight. That's what sucks the energy.

Are we sure this helps?

[ddt (14627)]

Most computers these days use LCD screens, and most LCD's use flourescent tubes as a backlight, which is what creates whiteness. If you put your ear really close to your screen, it's also what creates a faint hum. Those tubes draw most of the power on a display, and they don't turn off just because the screen goes black.

I don't think changing the colour to white changes the power draw significantly. It just means more of the flourescent tube light is passing through the screen.

Not true at all

[moosesocks (264553)]

All LCD screens get their light from a single backlight. When the display is on, the backlight is on. Always.

The LCD crystals in the screen act as tiny shutters, and can open or close to allow that light through, or keep it out. Although these shutters take a small amount of energy to open and close, it's insignificant compared to the amount of energy it takes to power the backlight.

A commenter in this thread [blogspot.com] commented that an Apple 17" display attached to a lab supply is measured as drawing 0.6W less when displaying a white screen than when displaying a black one.

CRT screens probably do draw less power when displaying a black screen, but on the whole they still draw considerably more power than an LCD under any circumstance. On the same note, CRT users may find that the white-on-black scheme is easier on their eyes -- I still have a CRT in my cube at work, and setting my editor to the white-on-black scheme is definitely more legible and less stressful on my eyes. (I still find it more legible on LCDs, although eye strain isn't an issue at all)

I don't get it... CowboyNeal should know better than this. Is he intentionally seeding flamebait?

How the hell would this work?

[Sycraft-fu (314770)]

It's not like it takes any less power to transfer the bits or anything like that, so they must be talking displays. Ok, fine, maybe (and I do emphasize maybe) this would work if we were all on CRTs but we aren't. LCDs are dominant these days. Well, their backlights are always on. They work by blocking light, not by emitting it. So their power consumption is constant, regardless of what the panel is doing.

To me this jsut sounds like more BS "Get more from less!" crap from people who probably aren't willing to make the simple changes that will actually, really make a difference.

Look, if you want to use less energy have your computer turn off monitor, disks, and suspend sooner, replace incandescent bulbs with CFLs (there are good full spectrum ones out there that give nice light), get a programmable thermostat and add some weatherstripping around doors and windows. It's simple, cheap and will do way more than crap like this.

LCDs

[king-manic (409855)]

Most new monitors are LCDS. LCD's are generally backlit and black is achieved by having all the pixels opaque. So wouldn't black cause a higher power usage? or just break even?

Bring back the BLINK tag...

[Octopus (19153)]

It will provide at least 50% in power savings.

Then again, that extra money might get taken up in seizure meds.

OLED

[aembleton (324527)]

I guess this could work with future OLED displays that only emit light on each pixel if it is needed, so a black background would require minimal energy. However, my current Samsung TFT monitor draws 40W whether it is on or off which I believe is due to the power transformer that it uses. Even with alternative displays, energy saving might not occur due to these power transformers.

Save energy by switching off your monitor

[rossdee (243626)]

and don't use a fancy scrensaver, just a blank screen.

Feel the

[jsse (254124)]

POWER saving of the darkside...

Skywalker: pardon?!

Re:Feel the

[RuBLed (995686)]

ha! so that's why the dark jedi's lightsabers last longer.. they go in power saving mode when idle...

Some real figures

[David Off (101038)]

I've just tested this on a Sony 15" LCD monitor (M51?).

Google.com: 18.5 watts
Blackle.com: 19.5 watts
Slashdot: 19 watts

so it would seem that using blackle is using about 5% more power.

userContent.css

[Door in Cart (940474)]

Who needs Blackle when there's userContent.css? Google's been white-on-black on my machines for years. Same with /. It's just easier on the eyes.

@-moz-document url-prefix(http://google.com), url-prefix(http://www.google.com) {
    body, .t {
        background:   black !important;
    }
    body {
        color:        white !important;
    }
    body, td, div, .p, a {
        font-family:  fixed-width !important;
    }
    a:link, .w, a.w:link, q:visited, q.link, q:active, .q {
        color:        #3366cc !important;
    }
    a:visited,
    span.a,
    span.a:link {
        color:        #888 !important;
    }
    div, td {
        color:        white !important;
    }
    table.histTable td {
        color:        black !important;
    }
    div#navbar div,
    table,
    td,
    div
        {
        background:   black !important;
    }
    input[title=Search] {
        background:   black !important;
        border:       1px solid #888 !important;
        padding:      0 3px !important;
    }
    input[title='Google Search'] {
        background:   black !important;
        border:       1px solid #888 !important;
        padding:      0 3px !important;
        margin-bottom: 20px !important;
    }
    img[src='/intl/en_ALL/images/logo.gif'] {
        padding-top:  110px;
        height:       0px !important;
        overflow:     hidden !important;
        background:   url(http://*************/google-black-276x110.jpg );
    }
    a#logo span {
        background-image: url(http://*************/google-black-150x78.jpg) !important;
    }
    img[src='/images/google_sm.gif'] {
        background-image: url(http://*************/google-black-150x78.jpg) !important;
        padding-top:  78px;
        height:       0px !important;
        overflow:     hidden !important;
    }
    div#gbarl {
        display:      none !important;
    }
}

It's all about priorities

[ben there... (946946)]

Somehow I suspect 116,144.654 is a bit overblown, and the About section amused me because obviously setting Blackle to your homepage only saves energy if you have Google for your homepage in the first place.

Yeah, but setting blackle.com as your homepage earns blackle.com a whole lot of money from Google Custom Search.

How can you help?

We encourage you to set Blackle as your home page. This way every time you load your Internet browser you will save a little bit of energy. Remember every bit counts! You will also be reminded about the need to save energy each time you see the Blackle page load.

Help us spread the word about Blackle by telling your friends and family to set it as their home page. If you have a blog then give us a mention. Or put the following text in your email signature: "Blackle.com - Saving energy one search at a time".

Think about how much energy we would have saved if we all didn't read this spamvertising.