I've been trying to do what I can for a while now, mostly for me it's about switching off things that don't need to be sat on Standby all the time, so I've bought a lot of switched 4/6 way power expanders or whatever you call them.
In my office for example everything except the actual base unit is on a switched gang, flick one switch and monitors/speakers/chargers all go off just leaving the base unit on.
I've started doing this with the home cinema/hifi stuff downstairs too, allowing me to turn everything off except the Sky+ box in case it's recording something.
The problem is that it's a pain in the ass to do, it means the switches are all tucked away behind things (where all the power is) so I was thinking about better ways to do it when I remembered back to the days when I worked in a datacentre (literally, I moved the ops function in there so we could play loud music and ignore everyone else!) after I moved on they moved it back out though....anyhow the thing about the datacentre is the big red emergency panic button that kills power to everything dead, this made me think that if I could do it easily I'd really like that kind of function in every room in my house.
I imagine something like this, next to the light switch is a power switch, you walk out and turn the lights off and if you know you aren't going to need anything in that room for a while then hit the power switch too and the room goes dead. In order for it to work well then you'd need two different types of socket in the room of course, one set linked to the power off switch and one permanently live for things like sky+, alarm clocks etc
I'd like to do it now but that would entail a major re-wire of the house (I think) and I'm not ready to do that just yet, but if I ever have the chance to do it I would, oh and I'd stick fixed network in too, Gigabit most likely!
One final thought is that when network based PVRs become a reality and work well then I don't even need to leave sky+ or similar on at all, I get everything I need from the magic cloud...
