GivEnergy EV Charger vs Wallbox Quasar 2: £478 wallbox or £6,100 bidirectional bet

A £5,622 gap and two different definitions of "smart"

These two chargers do not compete on the same shelf. The GivEnergy EV Charger at £478 is a conventional 7 kW AC wallbox whose trick is pulling cheap stored energy from a home battery into the car. The Wallbox Quasar 2 at £6,100 is a bidirectional DC unit that reverses the flow entirely — drawing power *out* of the car to run the house or export to the grid. One is a sensible buy today. The other is an expensive wager on a future that hasn't quite arrived.

• GivEnergy EV Charger — £478, 7 kW, charges from a home battery. A specialist tool for GivEnergy-ecosystem households.
• Wallbox Quasar 2 — £6,100, 12.8 kW bidirectional DC, V2H and V2G. UK pre-registration only; a handful of compatible cars.

What the GivEnergy does that most chargers cannot

Battery-to-EV charging. Most smart wallboxes — the Ohme Home Pro, the Hypervolt Home 3 Pro, even the solar-focused myenergi Zappi GLO — divert live solar to the car. Useful when the sun is out and the car is home, which in practice is a narrow overlap. The GivEnergy sidesteps that timing problem: charge the home battery from cheap overnight rates on something like Octopus Go at 8.5p/kWh, then release that stored energy into the car whenever you need it. The car doesn't have to be plugged in at half past midnight. The battery holds the cheap electrons until it's asked.

The catch is obvious. Without a home battery, this feature disappears — and what remains is a £478 charger with a 5-metre cable, a basic app, Wi-Fi connectivity, and schedule-based tariff support that cannot match the half-hourly optimisation of the Ohme Home Pro or the solar diversion finesse of the Zappi GLO. If you already own a GivEnergy battery, the charger slots into the monitoring portal and the whole system makes sense. If you don't, the Easee One at £405 does the same core job for less, and the comparison with the Quasar 2 is academic. For that pairing, the Easee One vs GivEnergy comparison is more useful.

What the Quasar 2 promises — and what it asks in return

The Quasar 2's pitch is that your car's battery — 60, 77, 100 kWh — dwarfs any home battery you'd buy. If the charger can pull power back out, the car *becomes* the storage. V2H keeps the lights on during a grid outage. V2G exports to the grid when prices spike on Octopus Agile, where half-hourly rates can swing from 5p to 35p or more.

The price of admission is steep and the conditions are strict. £6,100 for the unit — the European list price converted, since a confirmed UK RRP doesn't exist yet. Installation runs £1,500–£3,000 on top, with a specialist installer and a DNO G99 application that takes 30–60 working days. The total installed cost could exceed £9,000. The charger is not OZEV-approved, so the £500 grant is off the table.

Then there's the car. Bidirectional DC via CCS2 requires the vehicle to support it. The Kia EV9 is the headline name. Most UK Teslas — and most other EVs on British driveways — cannot do this today. Buying a Quasar 2 without a compatible car is buying a very expensive one-way charger.

The maths of V2G versus a home battery

The GivEnergy route — a home battery plus the £478 charger — typically costs £4,000–£7,000 for the battery and £478 plus installation for the charger. The Quasar 2 route costs £6,100 plus £1,500–£3,000 installation, but reuses storage you've already bought (the car). On paper, the Quasar 2 could be cheaper *if* your car supports it, *if* UK availability moves past pre-registration, and *if* a V2G tariff pays back the hardware over its 3-year warranty. That is a lot of ifs. The GivEnergy path works now, with equipment you can order this week, on tariffs that exist today.

A middle ground for the V2G-curious: the Indra Smart PRO at £599 is a V2G pioneer on the AC side, and the Zaptec Go 2 at £500 is V2G-ready with a firmware path. Neither does what the Quasar 2 does at 12.8 kW DC, but neither asks for £6,100 either.

Which to buy

Buy the GivEnergy EV Charger if:

• You have a GivEnergy or compatible home battery and want the car to draw from it
• You want a working system today at £478 plus standard installation
• You're an eligible renter or flat owner — the £500 OZEV grant covers the unit outright and chips into the install

Buy the Wallbox Quasar 2 if:

• You own or are about to own a bidirectional-capable car (Kia EV9 or equivalent)
• You have a V2G export tariff lined up and have done the payback arithmetic over 3 years
• You accept pre-registration status, a long install timeline, and a £6,100-plus outlay with no grant relief

For any reader who has to ask "should I wait for V2G?" — the answer, in April 2026, is probably not yet. The GivEnergy EV Charger paired with a home battery delivers the same core benefit — charging the car from cheap stored energy — without the compatibility lottery, without the DNO paperwork, and for a fraction of the cost. It is the charger to put on the wall today.