The need to retrofit hundreds of thousands of homes has grown ever more urgent as the cost of living crisis joins the climate crisis as reason to do it.
Fingal County Council says it would like to find a way to get private homes to sign up for retrofitting when it is upgrading social housing in mixed estates.
There have been calls for schemes to allow homeowners to opt-in to retrofitting when social housing in their area is being upgraded.
Advocates say this could save time and money and help meet ambitious retrofitting targets.
At the Whitechapel estate in Coolmine, Fingal County Council is retrofitting some of the homes it owns in the area. The tenants are delighted with results.
"It just came at the right time, with the prices of everything else going up. They say between €200 to €300 a year to run," said Rosaleen Fuller.
"Now I'm down to just one bill that's a great help as well."
Another resident Tom Collins said: "You notice the difference already inside, you can even find the quietness inside ... to me it's a different house."
On his terrace of houses there is just one that has not been retrofitted, the external insulation stops at the boundaries with the neighbours. It is not included in the scheme because the house is privately owned.
Martin Waters, Managing Director of Arthurstown Construction, the contractor doing the work, said the homeowner did approach him.
"There is a process, they can apply for a grant. They go through the steps to get the grant and then we can give them a quote," he said.
But that process can take some time and work in Whitechapel estate is expected to take around six or seven weeks.
"Unfortunately what could happen here is we could be gone before the grant process is completed," Mr Waters said.
That would mean potential savings in time and money would be lost as the work would be carried out as a single house project rather than the contractors doing it as they upgrade the rest of the terrace.
Robert Burns, Director of Housing and Community Development with Fingal County Council, said: "We are looking at how we can maybe leverage this programme we're doing with the social houses and bring in the private homes. At the moment there are some difficulties with that."
He pointed to funding as one issue to be resolved.
Retrofitting of social homes is funded by the Department of Housing and grants for homeowners to upgrade their insulation come from the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland.
Mr Burns said he thinks that could be dealt with "a single project manager".
"[They] would take care of social and private homes in the same estate and keep track of separate costs and governance and so on, then I think it could work," he said.
"We think there would be a lot of synergies from putting the two programmes together, which would allow it to move at pace and at scale and there should be better value for everybody in doing the works."
There are ambitious targets in the Programme for Government for retrofitting, including 500,000 homes upgraded to a B2 or better building energy rating (BER) by the end of 2030.
It also aims for 400,000 heat pumps installed during the same period to replace older less efficient heating systems.
These targets will need to be met if the Climate Action Plan target of bringing down emissions from home heating from 7Mt (million tonnes or megatonnes) of CO2 equivalent in 2018 to between 3.5-4.5Mt in 2030.
The cost of meeting those targets was estimated in 2021 to be €28bn and the cost of materials has risen since then.
