Sustainable Energy Ireland, the national energy agency, has an excellent series of leaflets on how to improve the energy-efficiency of your home.
These range from a consumer guide to sustainable energy to building an energy-efficient home. There are also detailed guides to home-heating systems, insulating your home and renovating an older home.
One booklet, the Home Energy Survey, shows how you can walk through your house room by room, identifying home-improvement projects that will deliver the greatest energy savings and reduce your fuel bills most effectively. And, for those keen to learn the basics of the jargon required, there is a leaflet explaining U-values, which, put simply, is the measure of the rate of heat loss through a material.
Sustainable Energy Ireland is also the agency that operates the Greener Homes grant schemes and holds the national register of Building Energy Rating (BER) assessors, who are qualified to give your home its own unique BER number which will be the key indicator of the energy-efficiency of your home in the future.
More details at www.sei.ie