Our 13th weekly #EcoMonday tip: Make Google green by going black! Google added a nice feature last week that allows users to customize their Google homepage wallpaper. Of course it's tempting to pick the palm tree infected bounty-island wallpaper, or those cute puppies, but we suggest you go black. Why? An all white webpage uses about 74 watts to display, while an all black page uses only 59 watts. EcoIron did the math back in 2007:

"Take at look at Google, who gets about 200 million queries a day. Let's assume each query is displayed for about 10 seconds; that means Google is running for about 550,000 hours every day on some desktop. Assuming that users run Google in full screen mode, the shift to a black background [on a CRT monitor! mjo] will save a total of 15 (74-59) watts. That turns into a global savings of 8.3 Megawatt-hours per day, or about 3000 Megawatt-hours a year. Now take into account that about 25 percent of the monitors in the world are CRTs, and at 10 cents a kilowatt-hour, that's $75,000, a goodly amount of energy and dollars for changing a few color codes."

Google grew quite a bit over the last few years. Currently the World's most popular search engine gets about 350 million queries a day making the energy saving potential even bigger. You can download an all black wallpaper here, just richt click the link and click save as. Another option would be to set Blackle as your default search engine. Blackle is basically Google but with a different interface. And small steps really do help, Blackle estimates 1,909,461.988 Watt hours saved since 2007.

#EcoMonday is Tech the Future's weekly eco-tip. We believe contributing to a better future shouldn't be too difficult. Small changes in our habits potentially have huge effects on our future. If we all make our own toothpaste for instance, we could save 897,600,000 kilo’s of plastic a year. #EcoMonday is also our means of spreading Twitter love. By adding '#' before EcoMonday, we (and you) are able to share our tips with the rest of the World. If you have an #EcoMonday tip to share, post it on Twitter today!