Sadhbh O'Neill

It's to give you as a consumer some control over your energy costs.

Because once you buy the appliance, you're locked into its lifetime.

Unless you decide to discard it, which would be a bit of a waste of money, you're going to continue to use it until it doesn't work anymore.

Now, the more expensive appliances generally have a longer life.

They're tested and the aim of these high brand or highly rated appliances would be to have them last for up to 20 years in some cases.

So sometimes it is worth paying the extra, not because of the energy savings so much, but because of what we call the total cost of ownership, that it's going to last longer, you'll have less maintenance and you'll get longer life from the machine because they are big

Well, that's where you can actually do a bit of homework and research yourself.

You can actually look at the appliance and if you can't find any evidence of what the rating is or was, because it could be an older machine, you can look it up.

The manufacturers have information online relating to all their appliances and their energy rating.

And you can even use, I would recommend people use, you know, some of these AI sort of applications

software things to actually calculate what the running costs are.

But the other thing is, I think, in order to make the most use of these energy labels and understanding how energy works, we need to add up all the things that we're spending, we're using electricity for at a household level and then translate that into what appears on our actual bill and understand how to read the bill, because otherwise you're

You might make cutbacks in a certain area that might not materialise on the bill a couple of months later.

So it's important to understand how your bill shows you this information and how to read that.

On the box itself, on the meter itself, virtually nothing.

It's gobbledygook to most people.

I can't understand any of the information on it.

So you really, in order to read the data, in order to access the data, you actually have to have an account with ESB Network.

So all the information, no matter who your supplier is, goes to this one portal in ESB Networks.

So if you're not already a customer of Electric Ireland or whatever, you need to actually set up a separate account with them and you need to have your NPRN, which is the...