Energy saving anyone?

With the advent of the oil crisis, what is being done for the individual house to reduce power consumption? Everyone knows about the craze of energy saving light bulbs but what about other devices?

I personally have a lot of devices in my television unit and all of them connect to a power outlet. All of them have a power converter to reduce the power to the circuitry on board. One thing I question myself is why there isn't another outlet for standard 12Volts or 5Volts DC instead. This would make it feasible for solar panels and much less power is lost in heat while doing power conversion.

This also includes computers. A UPS has to generate the power of an electrical outlet while 12V DC would be enough to power a machine and even a TFT monitor. A single DC power source in a house of 12V could power a lot of devices and also be able to use other sources of power generation. This would also mean less power company bills.

To install a solar powered system for a house you would need power converters to generate AC power for devices that would then still need to convert down to their own needs before usage. One can only imagine the amount of power lost in heat with all this conversion and we do not need more heat than there is already with the climate change.

So I am pleading the device manufacturers to think about a standard low power DC plug in their devices for alternate power.