Energy poverty arises from a number of intersecting factors, including high energy prices, low household incomes, specific household energy needs (e.g., health), and from having to live in inefficient, poorly performing buildings. While one’s level of income can be considered an important factor, it is by no means the defining factor. A key factor to consider when engaging with energy-vulnerable households is effectively identifying who is experiencing energy poverty or who might be energy insecure. Shame, stigma, and indeed the refusal to accept one is actually experiencing energy poverty can lead to what Bouzarovski & Simcock (2017: 640) refer to as ‘geographic disparities in the risk and incidence of domestic energy deprivation’. In addition, the multiple overlapping causes of energy poverty can lead to greater challenges for practitioners when trying to accurately identify energy-poor households, leading to hard-to-reach households often hiding in plain sight. One explanation from this has been that energy poverty analysis has tended to focus on the macro- and meso- scales, often ignoring the contexts at the local level. This paper presents findings from the EnergyMeasures H2020 project on identifying and recruiting energy-poor households across seven European countries (Dunphy et al., 2023) and draws on other global perspectives found in Velasco-Herrejón et al. (2023) to critique the range of approaches used to identify and measure energy vulnerability. It also presents the range of experiences our consortium partners faced when negotiating often very different historical, cultural, and environmental contexts specific to each country.