Easee One vs Wallbox Quasar 2: £405 wallbox or £6,100 bidirectional bet

A wallbox and a power station walk onto the same page

These two products share a category label — "EV charger" — and almost nothing else. The Easee One costs £405, weighs 1.5 kg, and puts AC into your car. The Wallbox Quasar 2 costs £6,100, weighs around 20 kg, and moves DC power in both directions — charging your car *and* feeding it back to your house or the grid. The price gap is £5,695. That is not a premium. It is the distance between buying a charger and buying into an energy strategy.

• Easee One — £405, standard 7.4 kW AC wallbox, available now, OZEV-approved. It charges your car.
• Wallbox Quasar 2 — £6,100, up to 12.8 kW bidirectional DC, UK pre-registration only, not OZEV-approved. It charges your car *and* turns it into a battery for your home.

Why the Quasar 2 costs fifteen times more

The Quasar 2 is a DC charger with a CCS2 connector and bidirectional capability — vehicle-to-home (V2H) backup and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) export. That means your EV's battery can power your house during a peak-rate evening, or sell electrons back to the grid on a tariff like Octopus Agile when export prices spike. The hardware to do this — DC conversion, grid-forming inverter, safety isolation — is categorically different from a £405 AC box that simply passes mains current through a Type 2 socket.

The install reflects the complexity. Where the Easee One lands at roughly £700–£1,000 all-in (its built-in Type B RCD and open-PEN detection trim the electrician's bill), the Quasar 2 demands a specialist installer, a DNO G99 application with a 30–60 working-day lead time, and an install bill of £1,500–£3,000 or more. Realistic total: north of £7,600.

The compatibility problem — and it is a problem

Bidirectional DC charging requires the car to support it. Today, that list is short. The Kia EV9 is the headline compatible vehicle; more manufacturers are expected, but "expected" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. If you drive a Tesla, a Hyundai, or most other UK EVs, the Quasar 2's marquee feature — the entire reason for the £5,695 gap — is inert. You would own a £6,100 DC charger that cannot yet talk back to most cars on British driveways.

The Easee One has no such constraint. It is an untethered Type 2 socket. Plug in any EV sold in the UK and it charges at up to 7.4 kW. No drama, no waiting list, no DNO paperwork.

The Easee One's actual trade-offs

Cheap does not mean perfect. The Easee One is untethered — you carry and connect your own cable each time, and the wall unit is a socket, not a permanently attached lead. Some owners prefer the tidier wall; others find the daily plug-in ritual tiresome, especially in the rain. The Quasar 2's 5-metre tethered CCS2 cable stays put.

The Easee's scheduling is manual — no direct tariff API to chase half-hourly rates on Agile. If smart-tariff optimisation matters to you, the Ohme Home Pro at £535 is the comparison that counts, and we cover that in the Ohme Home Pro vs Easee One piece. On a flat-rate or fixed off-peak tariff like Octopus Go, the Easee's manual schedule does the job.

IP54 is the lowest weather rating in our selection — adequate under a car port or sheltered wall, less reassuring on a fully exposed gable end. The Quasar 2's IP55 / IK10 is tougher, though at £6,100 you would hope so.

V2G without the bidirectional price tag

If the idea of V2G readiness appeals but the Quasar 2's price and availability do not, two AC chargers in the catalogue carry V2G-ready credentials at a fraction of the cost: the Zaptec Go 2 at £500 and the NexBlue Point 2 at £530. Neither can push power back today — they are AC units — but both support the protocols that V2G services are expected to use as the UK market matures. They hold the position without asking you to write a four-figure cheque on a pre-registration product.

The verdict

Buy the Easee One if:

• You want a working charger on your wall this month for under £1,000 installed
• Your car is any UK EV — Tesla, VW, BMW, Hyundai, anything with a Type 2 inlet
• You are OZEV-eligible (renter or flat owner) and want the £500 grant, which covers the £405 unit outright and chips into the install

Buy the Wallbox Quasar 2 if:

• You own (or have ordered) a CCS2 car confirmed for bidirectional DC — today, that means the Kia EV9
• You have a V2G export tariff or solar array that makes the payback arithmetic credible
• You accept pre-registration timelines, G99 paperwork, and an installed total above £7,600

For the overwhelming majority of UK households charging an EV in 2026, the Easee One is the answer. It is £405, it works, and it is here. The Quasar 2 is a fascinating piece of hardware aimed at a future that has not quite arrived — and when it does, the price will almost certainly fall. Patience, in this case, is cheaper than enthusiasm.