Simpson & Partners Home 7 vs Wallbox Quasar 2: £649 wallbox or £6,100 bidirectional bet?

A wallbox and a power station walk into a comparison

These two products do not compete. Placing them side by side is a bit like comparing a kettle with a diesel generator — both involve electricity, but the resemblance ends there. The Simpson & Partners Home 7 is a £649 AC wallbox that charges your car. The Wallbox Quasar 2 is a £6,100 bidirectional DC unit that charges your car *and* feeds energy back into your house or the grid. The price gap is £5,451. Whether that gap makes any sense depends on a question most readers can answer in about ten seconds: do you own a car that supports bidirectional DC charging?

• Simpson & Partners Home 7 — a UK-made 7kW smart charger with a 10-year enclosure warranty, anodised aluminium build, and smart-tariff scheduling. £649.
• Wallbox Quasar 2 — a 12.8kW bidirectional DC charger for vehicle-to-home and vehicle-to-grid use. Pre-registration only in the UK. £6,100 before installation.

What £649 gets you with the Simpson & Partners Home 7

A proper charger. The Home 7 delivers 7kW on single-phase (or 22kW if you have three-phase supply), supports scheduled charging via its own app, and works with Octopus Go, OVO Charge Anytime, and EDF GoElectric. The enclosure carries a 10-year warranty — the longest on any UK wallbox — though internal electronics are covered for three years. It comes tethered or untethered, in finishes that include Accoya wood and Cotswolds Green, which is a sentence you do not often write about electrical equipment.

The trade-off is brand recognition. Simpson & Partners has a smaller installer network than the household names, and fewer online reviews to lean on. The app is functional rather than polished. If design matters but you want more installer choice, the Andersen A3 vs Simpson & Partners Home 7 comparison covers that ground. For buyers eligible for the £500 OZEV grant (renters and flat owners), the Home 7's £649 unit price drops to £149 — a striking number for a premium-finish, 10-year-warranty charger.

What £6,100 gets you with the Wallbox Quasar 2

A fundamentally different proposition. The Quasar 2 is a CCS2 DC charger that pushes up to 12.8kW in both directions. In vehicle-to-home mode, your car's battery backs up the house during a power cut or during peak-rate hours. In vehicle-to-grid mode, it exports to the grid — and, on the right tariff, earns money doing so.

The caveats are substantial. First, the Quasar 2 is not available for open order in the UK as of April 2026 — it is pre-registration only, with no confirmed UK RRP (the £6,100 figure is converted from the European list price). Second, installation is not a standard wallbox job: it requires a specialist installer and DNO G99 approval for export, which carries a 30–60 working-day lead time. Installed cost is likely £7,600 or more. Third, the list of cars that support bidirectional DC charging via CCS2 remains short — the Kia EV9 is the headline name, and most UK Teslas cannot use the feature today. The warranty is three years, which feels thin at this price. And the £500 OZEV grant does not apply.

Can the Quasar 2 pay for itself?

In theory, yes. A V2G tariff that pays you to export at peak rates, combined with cheap overnight imports on something like Octopus Agile, can generate meaningful returns — perhaps £400–£800 a year depending on battery size, driving patterns, and export rates. At that pace, the payback on a £7,600+ installed cost is somewhere between a decade and never, unless tariff economics shift significantly or the hardware drops in price.

For readers drawn to the *idea* of V2G but not the Quasar 2's price, there are AC chargers labelled "V2G-ready" that cost a fraction as much — the Zaptec Go 2 at £500 and the Indra Smart PRO at £599 both position themselves for a future where AC V2G becomes standard. They cannot do what the Quasar 2 does today, but they cost roughly a tenth of the price and keep the door open.

The verdict

Buy the Simpson & Partners Home 7 if:

• You want a well-made AC wallbox that charges your Tesla on a smart tariff and lasts
• You value the 10-year enclosure warranty and UK-manufactured build
• You are not planning to export energy from your car to your house or the grid

Buy the Wallbox Quasar 2 if:

• You own (or have ordered) a bidirectional-capable car like the Kia EV9
• You are on or planning to join a V2G export tariff and have modelled the payback
• You accept pre-registration status, specialist installation, and a longer timeline

For the overwhelming majority of UK EV owners reading this page, the Simpson & Partners Home 7 is the answer. It charges your car, it schedules around cheap rates, and it does so for £649 — or £149 after the OZEV grant if you qualify. The Quasar 2 is a fascinating piece of hardware aimed at a market that barely exists in the UK yet. When that market matures, the calculus will change. Today, it has not.