Personally, I don't touch any of the advanced machines until I can support them idling all the time. I realize this is more troublesome if you are trying to setup deep mining base where solar and wind power aren't feasible.
Unless you have Buildcraft tubes taking up your space or something, you just have to put a block next to them and power that, say on top, in order to control them individually. If you aren't using Red Power 2, you could use arsenic87's hotfix, which neither has the indirect redstone thing, nor has forge ore dictionary support that cpw's hotfix has. Just some thoughts for ya.
Yea, i would avoid doing that, except that I wasn't thinking that hard at the time. I could easily attach a block on top of each of them however, and power them like that, so I think I will do that, at least if needed (isnt needed now however)