Have you ever had a great energy saving idea and felt that you would love to share it with an energy company that would take your idea to the next level?  Well here is your chance – E.ON have come up with 5 challenges to the British public, which are linked to their Home of the Future show aired on Channel 4 on Sunday nights, around the themes of work, rest, food, play and wellbeing.  The idea is that you sign up to their website E.ON Innovation and submit an idea under one of their themes.

The first theme is rest and asks ‘How could your home ‘learn’ about your energy usage to create a more restful environment?’  Maybe you would like the radio to automatically turn off when you leave the room and turn on when you return.  Or perhaps you would like your fridge to automatically go into holiday mode overnight.  You can get really creative here and your imagination is your only limitation!

I entered the challenge and suggested that it would be useful to have ‘intelligent appliances able to reset themselves after a power cut/ being turned off’.  I went through a phase of turning the oven, hifi and microwave in my kitchen off after each time I used them, but quickly got annoyed when I had to reset them every time I turned them back on.  Our oven won’t work until you reset the time so after a while I stopped doing it.  If these features came as standard in all new appliances, then eventually we would all have them in our homes and it would be easier to turn them off and on again.  It probably wouldn’t be a short term solution though.

Participants are encouraged to comment upon and vote for each others ideas, so if you do sign up, it would be great if you could vote for my idea or at least let me know what you think!  The most popular ideas will be submitted to a judges panel and a winner will be chosen for each theme.  Each winner will have their idea assessed for development by E.ON and will win a home energy makeover worth up to £2000.  An overall winner of those 5 will also be chosen and their energy home makeover will be increased to a value of up to £10,000.

You can follow the conversation about this project by following E.ON on Twitter (@talkingenergy) and looking out for the hashtag #eoninnov.