Easee One vs Simpson & Partners Home 7: the £244 question

The £244 question

Two chargers at opposite ends of the same room. The Easee One is £405 — the cheapest mainstream charger on the UK market, light enough to hold in one hand, with the protection electronics already inside the box. The Simpson & Partners Home 7 is £649: British-made, three-phase-capable, and carrying the longest enclosure warranty you can buy.

The shortest version:

• Easee One — the value pick. Single-phase, untethered, install-friendly thanks to integrated Type B RCD and open-PEN.
• Simpson & Partners Home 7 — the long-haul pick. Tethered or untethered, three-phase option, ten years on the enclosure.

What the £244 actually buys you

Four things, in descending order of how often they'll matter.

First, the warranty. Three years on the Easee, ten on the Simpson & Partners enclosure (three on its internals). If you're the sort of buyer who keeps hardware until it stops working, that's a real hedge. If you change house every five years, less so.

Second, the option of 22kW three-phase. Fewer than one in twenty UK homes have a three-phase supply, so for most readers this is a non-feature. If you do have three-phase — or you're buying now for a future self-build that will — the Easee can't follow you there; the Home 7 can.

Third, the cable. The Home 7 comes tethered or untethered; the Easee is untethered only. Tethered means the cable lives on the wall, which most people quietly prefer once they've done the daily unplug-and-coil a few times. Untethered keeps the wall tidy and future-proofs for different connector standards, which matters to almost nobody in practice.

Fourth, the finish. Anodised aluminium, Cotswolds Green, an Accoya wood option — the Home 7 is trying to be seen. The Easee is trying to disappear. Both are legitimate. If the charger is going on the front of a listed cottage, the answer isn't the white plastic one.

Where the Easee quietly wins

Install cost. The Easee One has a Type B RCD and open-PEN detection built in, which typically knocks £100–£200 off the electrician's labour. On a clean single-phase job, installed price lands close to £700. The Home 7 needs the usual external protection, so its £649 sticker is closer to £1,050 all-in. That's a real-world gap of roughly £350, not £244.

It's also 1.5 kg versus around 5.5 kg. That sounds trivial; it isn't, for the fitter drilling into pebble-dash, and it isn't for the aesthetics of a narrow porch wall either.

The built-in eSIM is the other understated detail. Lifetime 4G with no subscription means the Easee keeps its schedule running when the home Wi-Fi falls over — useful if your router lives at the opposite end of the house from the driveway. The Home 7 is Wi-Fi only.

Tariffs: a draw, with one asterisk

Neither charger has the half-hourly tariff smarts of an Ohme Home Pro. Both handle fixed windows — Octopus Go, EDF GoElectric, E.ON Next Drive — via scheduled charging in their respective apps. If you want a charger that chases Octopus Agile prices autonomously, neither of these is it; spend the £130 more and look at the Ohme instead.

On OVO Charge Anytime, the Home 7 has official integration and the Easee doesn't, which is a genuine, if narrow, advantage for OVO customers.

Which to buy

Buy the Easee One if:

• You're on single-phase (which, statistically, you are) and on a fixed-window tariff.
• You want the lowest total installed cost without going near budget-brand hardware.
• Your Wi-Fi doesn't reach the driveway, and the lifetime 4G solves the problem.

Buy the Simpson & Partners Home 7 if:

• You have, or are planning, a three-phase supply.
• You want a tethered 5-metre cable and won't be swayed on that.
• The ten-year enclosure warranty and a made-in-Britain finish are worth £244 to you.

Put on a wall without a brief, the Easee is the one. It does less, deliberately, and the money saved is real — both at the till and on the electrician's invoice. The Home 7 is the right answer for a specific buyer: three-phase, tethered, patient about the smaller installer network. That's a defensible case, just not the common one. Still undecided between the S&P and a pricier British-built rival? The Andersen A3 comparison is the next page to read.