It's sunny out. Yesterday was sunny. It's supposed to be sunny until maybe Monday. This is making me incredibly happy.
I ran across something interesting today in an email from the re-localization group: Blackle. It's a search engine. A google-powered search engine, only the background is black, which saves monitor/display energy. They have a little counter under the search bar that tallies the "watt hours saved". My only question is this: if it's just google, only with a black background, then why doesn't google go black? I believe I have a partial answer: 1) people would freak out if they went to google and it was suddenly looking very different, which might hurt google's business; and 2) the people with eye strain issues might really have a problem with it. It doesn't really bother my eyes until AFTER I follow a link, when suddenly the background is white again. But then again, I've been in the darkroom all day, which tends to give me headaches and cause eye strain anyway. The letters are nice and soft, though - not hard-edged, which seems to be a bit easier. I'm sure the letters are gray, not white, which helps a bit as well.
564,529.087 watt hours saved. what IS a watt hour? A Watt hour (Wh) is a unit of energy equivalent to one watt of power expended for one hour of time. Apparently, that's 3600 Joules (J) of energy. [A joule is one watt second (Ws). 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour and POOF suddenly you're up to 3600 Ws or Joules or a Wh. Go figure.] A kilowatt hour (kWh) is 1000 J per second expended over an hour, or 3,600,000 J. So... a kWh is a 1000 Wh... all pretty simple.
so thats an energy savings of 564 kWh... the new boiler/powerplant system I'm looking into for the house generates 1.2 kW (not per hour, or per anything...). According to my latest utility bill, I pay about $0.10 per kWh - not including all the fees & add ons. And I use under 500 kWh per month (good to know, since I'm looking to Freewatt). Please note that I have spared you all the mental gymnastics that I went through yesterday in calculating how much propane we might use if we had a 95% efficient liquid propane boiler versus how much oil we use in our 83% efficient oil boiler. But here's the outcome: the oil boiler lost. Duh.
So basically, Blackle has offset my energy usage for the month since it went on line during that one-hour of no electricity thing a few weeks ago. Somehow, I am under impressed. Maybe they just need better exposure.
So I went to Blackle looking for a button to add to my tool bar. No button. I went to the support section of my browser to try and add Blackle as a search engine. No support. I went to the "about Blackle" section of the search page... and they suggested I reset my homepage to Blackle. For some reason, this really made me mad. I LIKE my home page, and I'm not going to reset it to Blackle.
So Blackle, at this point, seems like a good idea gone horribly under exposed, under promoted and under supported.
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2 comments:
Test conducted by Google itself http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/is-black-new-green.html has proven that Blackle may save little energy with CRT monitors but will actually increase energy consumption with LCD monitors.
Because of this misconception, it has created a easy money making business for the creator of Blackle. It has been estimated by many SEOs that he should be pocketing over thousands of dollars each day from google ads.
Also it is very obvious that Blackle is violating Google’s TOS and adsense policy, “Publishers are not permitted to make prominent use of ‘Google Brand Features’”.
I personally think it is so unfair for other publishers that are putting huge amount of times and effort into writing quality contents for website to attract visitors and increase their income from adsense, while someone just violate the adsense policy and Google isn’t doing anything about it.
If anyone agree with me and want to stop Blackle, then just visit Google’s adsense violation contact form and lodge your complaint about Blackle. STOP BLACKLE!
Violation contact form
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/request.py?search_ask=1&subtopic=&contact=rpv&main_topic=other&contact_type=11&contact_topic=Report+a+policy+violation&Action.Search=Continue
I gotta tell you, I have no idea whether that comment is valid or not. But I can see how it could be, so I published it, and will let y'all make up your own minds.
For what its worth, although the Blackle idea was appealing, I've found it isn't so useful, as I have this nice little google field right in my toolbar, and I'm too lazy to actually go to a separate website for a search.
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