While the energy lost from standby in some cases maybe minimal - the fact remains it's energy being consumed that in all honesty isn't required, and to borrow your metaphor -- if you save enough peanuts here and there you'll soon have enough for a bagfull.

Stand-by-awareness should be a focus as its the simplest and easiest form of energy management, and is usualy a great start in re-educating energy consumers. I agree with your approach entirely but i've found trying to get customer's to adopt this, is only (in general terms) possible if you are dealing with a customer who has experienced a large and unexpected bill, or a customer who you've managed to "educate". (I use this temr loosley and with regard only to EE-thinking).

So starting with the quick and simple and soemthing with an immediate and visiable result is a great start. You then progress through other measures, thicker winter curtains, double/triple/secondary.tertiary glazing, draught excluders, radiator reflectors, thermo-static controls, cavity wall and loft insulation, boiler and heating system maintenance, energy generation methods (solar, PV panels, CHP etc) all the way through to consumption monitoring and behavoural impact on consumption.

At the end of the day the very best way of saving money (not only in terms of energy consumption) is not to spend it in the first place. So any work towards this goal will provide a beneift albeit in (very) small individual chunks.

Graeme Delap:

First a rant. If the "standby device" is not warm then hardly any energy is being used. Note, "used" not wasted. All energy consumed within a building's thermal envelope during the heating season contrubutes to heating.

Of course energy is "lost" if insulation is poor but standby "wasted" energy is "peanuts" compared with the cost of the heating energy. The real "waste" is the money spent on quangos to tell us about standby waste when our housing stock is so badly insulated.

Now my approach. People should become aware of their annual energy consumption in kWhrs. Ask the supplier if it can't be worked out from the bill. In fact it should be a legal requirement for bills to display annual consumption in kWhrs, but oh no we've got "standby awareness" trumpeted.

Then compare savings on a comparison website using annual consumption.

For most consumers actual cost savings are much more important than the piffling savings delivered by some of the suggestions.

What are your energy saving tips?

The cold weather is fast approaching so I'm looking for your best tips to save gas and electricity and keep your heating bills as low as possible. What do you think are the simplest and most important things to do this winter to keep the costs down?

There are some in one of this week's articles 'Ten simple steps for saving energy'.

I reckon the community can do much better...so what are your gas and electricty money-saving tips?