Chargestorm Connected 3

At around £1,086 for the single-outlet unit, the Chargestorm Connected 3 is the home face of a charger CTEK already sells in large public car parks — 51 of them at Manchester's Ancoats Mobility Hub, for one. It is, first of all, a three-phase charger: 32A per phase, 22kW at full tilt, 400V input, with a four-metre fixed tail out of the bottom into a Type 2 socket. On a standard UK single-phase supply it will deliver the usual ~7.4kW, but the reason to buy this one, rather than almost anything else on this list, is if you have three phases at the meter.

NANOGRID is CTEK's dynamic load management, and the piece worth understanding before committing. It watches whole-house draw and trims the car's current so the main fuse never trips — useful on a heat-pump-plus-oven-plus-car evening. The way it sees the house matters: on a UK install, most electricians reach for NANOGRID Air, a small gateway that reads a smart meter's P1 or HAN port over Wi-Fi. Where a smart meter isn't cooperative, the charger will talk Modbus/TCP to a separately fitted meter instead. Neither is exotic, but both are extra hardware, quoted separately, and worth pricing before you commit.

Best for: homes with a three-phase supply, or households planning one, who want commercial-grade hardware and can live with a third-party app for the clever bits.

Installation

A 160 × 282 × 449 mm plastic-and-metal box, up to 24 kg, IP54, IK10. A four-metre tail to the Type 2 socket, so not tethered in the usual sense — you bring your own cable. The enclosure has punch-out cable entries and two Ethernet ports so a terrace of units can be daisy-chained without a switch. Fusing is 32A per outlet; CTEK has built in an MRCD Type B (30mA AC / 30mA DC), which means your installer won't need to add an external Type B at the consumer unit — a real-money saving on three-phase jobs. The MID-approved, Eichrecht-compliant energy meter is also built in, which is more useful to a landlord than a householder but worth knowing about. Full walkthrough in our home charger install guide.

Tariff compatibility

This is where the unit is honest about what it is. CTEK's own Taking Charge app is listed against the older CC2; for the CC3, scheduling and smart-tariff work happens through Monta or another OCPP 2.0.1 back-end. There is no first-party integration with Intelligent Octopus Go or OVO Charge Anytime, which are the two UK tariffs that lean hardest on the charger talking directly to the supplier. On a fixed-window tariff like Octopus Go, setting a nightly schedule in Monta is fine. If you want the supplier picking cheap half-hours for you, pair a different charger — the Ohme Home Pro is the obvious one. More in our best EV tariffs guide.

Price

Eligible for the £500 OZEV grant — CTEK confirmed OZEV approval in December 2024 — so renters and flat owners bring the total down closer to £1,500. Three-phase supply upgrades, where needed, push the install materially higher; NANOGRID Air is a separate purchase.

Against the field

The nearest comparison is the Zaptec Go 2: also Scandinavian, also three-phase, also built for homes that might one day do V2G. The Zaptec is smaller, lighter, and has a better-known UK installer network; the CTEK is the more serious piece of hardware, with an MID meter and a Type B MRCD built in that the Zaptec leaves to the installer. The Wallbox Pulsar Max is the cheaper three-phase option, and the Hypervolt Home 3 Pro has the sharper app. Against the Easee One, the CTEK costs more and asks more of the installer — but it reads as built for a car park and scaled down, rather than the other way round.