CTEK Chargestorm Connected 3 vs Wallbox Quasar 2: £5,014 apart, different universes

A charger and a power station walk into a comparison

These two products share a product category in the loosest sense. The CTEK Chargestorm Connected 3 at £1,086 is a commercial-grade AC wallbox that happens to fit on a house wall. The Wallbox Quasar 2 at £6,100 is a bidirectional DC unit that can push energy back from your car into your home — or, eventually, the grid. The price gap is £5,014. The question is not which charges better. It is whether the Quasar 2's party trick is worth five grand and a waiting list.

• CTEK Chargestorm Connected 3 — three-phase 22 kW AC charger, OCPP-native, five-year warranty, OZEV-approved. Charges a car. Does it well.
• Wallbox Quasar 2 — 12.8 kW bidirectional DC, V2H and V2G capable, three-year warranty, not OZEV-approved, UK pre-registration only. Charges a car *and* discharges it back into your house — if you own one of the few cars that support it.

What the CTEK actually is

The Chargestorm Connected 3 is over-engineered for a domestic driveway, and that is partly the point. It carries a built-in MID-approved energy meter, Type B MRCD protection (saving £100-odd on an external device), OCPP 2.0.1 support, and ISO 15118 plug-and-charge readiness. It is IP54, IK10, and rated down to −30°C — none of which a Surrey garage will test, but all of which suggest hardware that will outlast its five-year warranty without fuss.

The trade-off is software. There is no first-party app that talks to Octopus Intelligent Go or OVO Charge Anytime. Scheduling runs through a third-party OCPP back-end like Monta. If you want set-and-forget tariff optimisation, the Ohme Home Pro at £535 or the Hypervolt Home 3 Pro at £690 will do it natively. The CTEK earns its keep when you have — or plan — a three-phase supply and want open-protocol hardware that no single vendor's cloud can orphan.

What the Quasar 2 promises — and what it delivers today

Bidirectional charging is the idea that your EV battery becomes a home battery, absorbing cheap overnight electricity and feeding it back during the peak. At 12.8 kW in both directions, the Quasar 2 could theoretically shave hundreds off an annual bill, especially paired with something like Octopus Agile where import and export rates swing wildly by the half-hour.

The problems are concrete, not theoretical. First, the Quasar 2 is not on open sale in the UK — it is pre-registration only, with no confirmed delivery date. Second, the list of compatible vehicles is vanishingly short; the Kia EV9 is the flagship, and most Teslas cannot bidirectionally discharge through CCS2 today. Third, installation requires a DNO G99 application — 30 to 60 working days — and a specialist installer, pushing the installed total to £7,600 or more. Fourth, the £500 OZEV grant does not apply. And fifth, the warranty is three years, two fewer than the CTEK's, on a unit costing more than five times as much.

None of this means V2G is vapourware. It means the Quasar 2 is a product for the 2027 or 2028 buyer — someone with a compatible car on order, a V2G export tariff locked in, and £7,600+ of patience. For that person, it is the reference device. For everyone else, it is a deposit on a future that has not quite arrived.

The arithmetic of waiting

Suppose you buy the CTEK today at £1,086 — or £586 after the OZEV grant for eligible buyers — and charge on Octopus Go at 8.5p/kWh. Your annual charging cost on 7,400 miles sits around £250–£300. The Quasar 2, installed at roughly £7,600, would need to save you the difference between peak import and off-peak export — perhaps 20–25p/kWh on a good day — across enough cycles to claw back over £6,500 in extra outlay. That is years of daily cycling, with battery degradation and tariff changes as open variables. A dedicated home battery like a GivEnergy system paired with the GivEnergy EV Charger at £478 may reach the same outcome for less total spend and no car-compatibility lottery.

The verdict

Buy the CTEK Chargestorm Connected 3 if:

• You have or are installing a three-phase supply and want 22 kW AC charging
• You value open-protocol hardware (OCPP 2.0.1, ISO 15118) over app-driven tariff integration
• You want built-in Type B protection, a MID meter, and a five-year warranty without extras

Buy the Wallbox Quasar 2 if:

• You already own a bidirectional-capable car (today, that mostly means a Kia EV9)
• You have a V2G export tariff arranged and a DNO G99 application underway
• You understand you are buying version one of a category, at version-one prices

For the vast majority of UK households — single-phase, Tesla or other mainstream EV, no immediate V2G ambition — neither of these is the obvious first choice. The CTEK is specialist three-phase kit; the Quasar 2 is a technology preview with a four-figure price tag. If you are on single-phase and want the smartest possible charger for the least money, start with the Ohme Home Pro or the Easee One and revisit bidirectional hardware when the cars and tariffs catch up. If you do have three phases and want something built to outlast two cars, the CTEK at £1,086 is the more defensible spend — by a margin of about £5,014.