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A common strategy to reduce energy consumption and CO₂ emissions is retrofitting residential buildings to high thermal standards. But households in retrofitted homes often consume more space heating energy than expected, thus frustrating climate and energy goals. Most interventions to mitigate this focus on energy-inefficient ‘behaviours’, and assume that identifying the causes of these behaviours can deliver interventions that change consumption patterns and habits across large groups of consumers. A detailed investigation of sensor data from 60 retrofitted apartments served as a testing ground for an alternative or supplementary approach: targeting ‘behavers’ rather than ‘behaviours’. Consumption patterns supported the division of households into ‘light’, ‘medium’ and ‘heavy’ consumers, each showing a normally distributed picture of consumption. Heavy consumers (23% of households) consumed 52% of …