Easee One vs EO Mini Pro 3: the £145 size question

The £145 that buys you a smaller box

Two single-phase chargers, broadly similar on paper, priced £145 apart. The Easee One is £405 — the cheapest mainstream charger on the UK market. The EO Mini Pro 3 is £550, and its selling point is physical: it's the smallest proper home charger you can buy in Britain. Everything else about this comparison flows from those two facts.

• Easee One — the value default. Light, cheap, integrated protection, untethered.
• EO Mini Pro 3 — the one that fits where others won't. Tethered, compact, with solar CT clamp in the box.

Is the EO's £145 premium worth it?

On specs, no. The Easee runs at 7.4kW to the EO's 7.2kW — a rounding error in practice, but the cheaper unit is nominally faster. Both carry IP54 weather ratings and three-year warranties. Both handle scheduled charging and smart-tariff presets without talking directly to your supplier's API. The Easee's built-in eSIM with lifetime 4G is the more interesting connectivity story; the EO's Ethernet port is the more boring-but-reliable one.

Where the EO earns its £145 is when the wall dictates the decision. At 215 × 140 × 100 mm it's roughly A5-sized, and if you're fitting a charger into a narrow porch, beside a doorway, or onto a recessed mount where a standard unit would protrude awkwardly, the Easee's 256 × 193 mm footprint is suddenly the problem. The EO is often the only charger that fits without a rethink.

The other £145 justification is the British Gas Hive Power+ tariff, which credits back 25% of charging costs when paired with the Hive Power+ version of this unit. That's a structural discount no other charger in the catalogue matches — but it only works inside the British Gas ecosystem, and only for customers who'd be on that tariff anyway.

The untethered trade-off

The Easee One is untethered; the EO Mini Pro 3 ships with a 5-metre tethered cable. This is the feature most buyers get wrong in both directions.

Untethered is neater when the car is away, and it lets you swap cables if you ever change car brands or buy a longer lead. The cost is a small daily friction — unlocking the boot or glovebox, uncoiling the cable, plugging both ends in. Over five years, that adds up. Tethered is faster: one motion, plug in, walk away.

If you park in the same spot every night and the cable run is short, tethered almost always wins on quality of life. If you share the drive with a partner's car, or want the wall to look clean, untethered has the edge. Neither is objectively better — but the Easee is the one that assumes you're happy to carry a cable, and the EO is the one that takes that decision off your plate.

What the install looks like

The Easee One has a Type B RCD and open-PEN detection built in, which typically takes £100–£200 off the installer's labour bill. A clean job on a standard consumer unit lands close to £700 all-in. The EO Mini Pro 3 sits at £550 for the unit, plus the same £400–£600 install window, with no integrated protection to offset the labour. Budget around £950–£1,150 installed.

For renters and flat-owners claiming the £500 OZEV grant, the grant covers the Easee's unit cost outright and contributes to the install on top. On the EO, the £500 takes the unit down to £50 and leaves install to the buyer. Either way, the Easee is the cheaper landing by a clear margin.

Which to buy

Buy the Easee One if:

• Price matters and you're happy to handle your own cable.
• Your installer will credit you for the integrated Type B RCD.
• You want a lighter, smaller-profile mount that stays clean when the car's away.

Buy the EO Mini Pro 3 if:

• Your wall space won't accept anything bigger.
• You're a British Gas customer using Hive Power+ for the 25% cashback.
• You want a tethered 5-metre cable and a CT clamp for modest solar diversion.

On any wall that will take either, the Easee One is the buy. £145 cheaper, marginally faster, lighter, with install-labour savings baked in. The EO Mini Pro 3 is a specialist's answer to a specialist's problem — a small wall, or a Hive tariff. If neither applies, save the money. And if smart-tariff optimisation is what you actually want, neither of these is the right answer — the Ohme Home Pro at £535 is, and the Ohme Home Pro vs Easee One comparison makes that case in full.