In January, a blogger named Mark Ontkush wrote in his blog EcoIron that an all-black Google home page would save 750 megawatt-hours of electricity a year.  What does that mean?  We looked it up.

Turns out 750 megawatt-hours can power for an entire year:

-- 77 North American homes

-- 150 European homes

-- 268 African homes

-- 536 Asian or South American homes

-- 3,750 homes in Afghanistan

-- 6,000 televisions

-- 800 microwaves

Ontkush pointed out that an all-white Web page requires about 74 watts to display, where a black page requires only 59 watts.

In response, an Australian company called Heap Media created a Google-powered site called blackle.com.  The site keeps a running total of the number of watts saved to date.  At press time, that number was nearly 135 million watt-hours.

There's something oddly attractive about the Blackle homepage.  We find it calming – both in look and the fact that we're saving energy.

Click here to find out more, including instructions on how to make Blackle your home page.