Google Turns the Lights Off

Google has made their homepage black today to heighten awareness to Earth Hour. Earth Hour is a worldwide energy conservation effort that Google has partnered with recently. The idea is that today from 8pm to 9pm local time to turn out your lights. It is nice to see some companies looking out for the environment. Even though they use a ton of power, they are one of the leaders in renewable energy usage also. They already have a huge solar panel farm on the roof of the Googleplex and it is said to only get bigger in the future.

I turned the lights out on my blog a while ago in efforts to save electricity. It turns out that on most CRT monitors this is true, but on LCD monitors the opposite applies in most cases. Google had a few links to other studies from within the turn the lights out link on their homepage. One of those reports stated that around 75% of computer users today run LCD monitors, so I might have to rethink my layout. I use a CRT, so it works for me, but it will only work if it helps save electric for most.

I can say that most of the lights in my house were off except for the room I was in. I did make sure that all other lights in the house were off and I use those nice low wattage florescent bulbs which all of the bulbs used in my house only add up to 1 - 60W incandescent bulb. I should have probably made this post earlier in the day, but I was out enjoying some of the nice weather we had today.