Easee One vs Rolec EVO: the £44 question

The £44 that buys you solar

Two untethered 7.4kW chargers, both OZEV-approved, £44 apart. The Easee One is the cheapest mainstream charger on the UK market at £405. The Rolec EVO costs £449 and is built in Boston, Lincolnshire, with a five-year warranty and solar surplus modes in the box.

They overlap more than their brands suggest. Both are untethered Type 2 sockets, both single-phase only, both IP54, both include built-in protection that shaves install labour. The decision hinges on two specific things: whether you have solar panels, and whether your home Wi-Fi reaches the driveway.

• Easee One — £405, lifetime 4G built in, the lightest wall mount here at 1.5 kg.
• Rolec EVO — £449, Eco+ surplus solar, CT clamp included, five-year warranty.

Is the Rolec EVO's £44 premium worth it?

Only if you fall into one of two camps. The first is solar owners. The Rolec EVO ships with a CT clamp and two surplus modes — Eco, which tops up from grid when solar dips, and Eco+, which only charges from genuine surplus. The Easee One has dynamic load balancing but no surplus diversion, so matching solar requires either an extra module or a tariff workaround. If you're buying a charger to soak up panel output, the £44 is already spent before you've opened the app. Solar-first buyers should also look at the Ohme vs Zappi GLO comparison — the myenergi Zappi GLO remains the category benchmark.

The second camp is warranty-conscious buyers. Five years from a British manufacturer against three from Easee is a genuine gap, and Rolec's commercial charging estate is a decade deep. If you plan to keep the charger for the life of the car and the next one after it, the longer cover matters.

Everyone else — fixed-tariff households, small driveways, no panels — is paying £44 for specs they won't use.

When the Easee One is the right £405

Flip the argument and the Easee One has its own territory. The built-in eSIM with lifetime 4G is the feature the Rolec EVO lacks and can't retrofit. If your router sits at the back of the house and the charger lives at the front of a long driveway, the Easee One keeps scheduling alive where the Rolec goes dark. Cord Zero and a handful of others match this, but not at £405.

The weight is the other quiet advantage. 1.5 kg against the Rolec's 3 kg sounds trivial until the installer is drilling into rendered brick or an older pebbledash wall — lighter mount, smaller footprint, cleaner job. And the integrated Type B RCD and open-PEN detection typically trim £100–£200 off install labour, which narrows the total-installed gap further.

On an OZEV-eligible install — renters or flat owners, £500 off the unit — the grant wipes out the Easee One's £405 unit price outright and chips into the install cost too. The Rolec EVO at £449 is in the same position. Against the grant, the £44 difference barely registers.

A word on tariffs

Neither of these chargers talks directly to Octopus. Both rely on manual scheduling, which works cleanly on fixed windows like Octopus Go (00:30–05:30) or E.ON Next Drive (00:00–06:00) —