Simpson & Partners Home 7 vs Ohme ePod

The £150 that buys you aluminium — or a smarter socket

These two chargers want different things from your wall. The Simpson & Partners Home 7 at £649 is a UK-manufactured, anodised aluminium unit with finish options — Cotswolds Green, Accoya wood — that belong on a country house. The Ohme ePod at £499 is a 1.48 kg puck with a 4G SIM inside it and the best tariff-chasing software in the UK market. The Simpson & Partners Home 7 is £150 more than the Ohme ePod. That gap narrows or widens depending on what you think a charger is for.

• Simpson & Partners Home 7 — premium build, 10-year enclosure warranty, tethered or untethered, three-phase option. The charger you buy when curb appeal matters.
• Ohme ePod — untethered only, cable not included, but direct API links to Octopus and British Gas tariffs. The charger you buy when your electricity bill matters more than your brickwork.

Smart tariff support is not a level playing field

Both chargers call themselves smart. The difference is depth. The ePod shares its software platform with the Ohme Home Pro — direct integration with Octopus Intelligent Go at 8p/kWh, Octopus Agile at variable half-hourly rates, and British Gas EV Power at 9p/kWh. It reads the tariff, sets a "ready by" time, and fills the battery during the cheapest slots automatically. Price-cap settings let you tell it never to charge above a threshold — useful on Agile, where a spike can wipe out a week of savings.

The Simpson & Partners Home 7 supports Intelligent Octopus Go through direct scheduling, and handles Octopus Go and EDF GoElectric on a timer. That is fine for fixed off-peak windows — set it to 00:30–05:30 and forget it. But on Agile, where rates shift every 30 minutes, the S&P app cannot chase them. The ePod can. If you are on or considering a variable tariff, that difference alone justifies the ePod.

The cable question changes the maths

The ePod is untethered and ships without a Type 2 cable. A decent 5-metre cable costs £100–£200, which pushes the real outlay to £599–£699. At the top of that range, the gap to the Simpson & Partners Home 7 disappears entirely — and the Home 7 can be ordered tethered with a 5-metre cable included.

There is a practical case for untethered: if you charge at destinations and want one cable for home and away, keeping it in the boot makes sense. But if the charger sits on a garage wall and never travels, paying extra for a separate cable is just friction. The tethered Simpson & Partners Home 7 removes it.

Build quality and warranty — where the £150 goes

The Home 7's enclosure warranty runs to 10 years — the longest on the UK market. That covers the anodised aluminium housing, not the electronics inside (those get three years, same as the ePod). Still, the housing is the part exposed to weather, and aluminium outlasts plastic by a wide margin. If you are mounting on the front of a house where the charger is visible from the street, the Home 7's finish options — including wood-fronted and heritage colours — put it in a different category from the ePod's minimal white disc. For that kind of buyer, the Andersen A3 at £900 is the usual recommendation, and the Home 7 undercuts it by £251 with a longer enclosure warranty. That comparison has its own page.

The ePod, at 1.48 kg, is the lightest smart charger sold in the UK. It mounts almost anywhere — a thin fence post, a cramped garage side wall — and its built-in 4G SIM means it works where Wi-Fi cannot reach. The trade-off: no Wi-Fi fallback. Check your mobile signal at the mounting position before ordering. A dead spot at the charger means a dead charger.

Which to buy

Buy the Simpson & Partners Home 7 if:

• The charger is front-of-house and you want it to look like it belongs there
• You value a 10-year enclosure warranty over software sophistication
• You are on a fixed off-peak tariff like Octopus Go or EDF GoElectric, where a timer does the job

Buy the Ohme ePod if:

• You are on or moving to Octopus Intelligent Go or Octopus Agile and want the charger to chase rates for you
• Wall space is tight, or your Wi-Fi does not reach the charging point
• You want one cable for home and destination charging

For most buyers on a smart tariff, the ePod is the stronger pick — its software earns back the cable cost within a year of optimised charging. But if your tariff is fixed-window and your wall faces the road, the Home 7 is one of the few chargers that improves a house rather than cluttering it. Factor in the cable cost honestly: at £599–£699 all-in, the ePod's headline advantage fades, and the decision becomes about software versus substance.