Wallbox Pulsar Max vs CTEK Chargestorm Connected 3: £550 apart, worlds apart

A home charger and a car-park unit walk onto a driveway

The Wallbox Pulsar Max costs £536. The CTEK Chargestorm Connected 3 costs £1,086. That is a £550 gap — wider than the full price of the Easee One. It demands a clear reason to exist, and for most readers it will not find one.

• Wallbox Pulsar Max — compact, 5-year warranty, app-scheduled, £536. A domestic charger that stays in its lane.
• CTEK Chargestorm Connected 3 — MID-metered, OCPP 2.0.1, ISO 15118, built-in Type B RCD, £1,086. A commercial-grade unit that happens to be OZEV-approved.

What the CTEK's £550 buys — and who needs it

On paper the CTEK specification is formidable: OCPP 1.6-J and 2.0.1, ISO 15118 plug-and-charge, MID-approved Eichrecht-compliant metering, RFID authentication, dual Ethernet, optional 4G, and an integrated MRCD Type B so the installer can skip the separate £100-odd RCD. That is a serious parts list. It is also, for a single-phase house with one Tesla on the drive, a serious case of over-specification.

The MID meter matters if you are billing tenants or employees per kWh — it is a legal-metrology requirement for resale. OCPP matters if you want the charger managed by a back-end such as Monta rather than a proprietary app. ISO 15118 matters if you want tap-free authentication from the car itself. None of these are typical residential concerns. They are landlord, fleet, and workplace concerns. If that describes you, the CTEK is one of the few sub-£1,100 units that ticks every box, and the Zaptec Go 2 at £500 is the natural comparison — not the Wallbox.

For everyone else, the Wallbox Pulsar Max delivers 7.4kW on single-phase (or 22kW on three-phase, same as the CTEK), schedules via its own app, weighs 4.2 kg instead of up to 24 kg, and fits in a space barely larger than a saucer — 198 × 201 mm. It is, by any domestic measure, the more proportionate tool.

Neither charger talks to your tariff

This is the shared weakness. The Wallbox has no direct tariff API — no Octopus Intelligent Go integration, no OVO Charge Anytime link. You set a schedule in the myWallbox app and leave it. The CTEK is no better: scheduling requires a third-party OCPP platform, and there is no first-party Octopus or OVO connection either.

On a fixed off-peak tariff such as Octopus Go — 8.5p/kWh, 00:30–04:30 — manual scheduling is fine. Set it once, forget it. On Octopus Agile, where half-hourly rates shift daily, neither charger can chase the cheapest slots. If smart-tariff optimisation matters to you, the Ohme Home Pro at £535 — a pound less than the Wallbox — is the charger to look at instead. That comparison is covered in detail on the Ohme Home Pro vs Wallbox Pulsar Max page.

Installation cost widens the gap further

The Wallbox's typical install runs £400–£600. The CTEK's runs £900–£1,300 — partly because of the unit's 24 kg bulk, partly because installers with CTEK experience are thinner on the ground in the UK. Add unit and install together and you are looking at roughly £936–£1,136 all-in for the Wallbox versus £1,986–£2,386 for the CTEK. The OZEV grant knocks £500 off for eligible renters and flat owners — both chargers are approved — but even after the grant, the CTEK's total cost is comfortably double.

The verdict

Buy the Wallbox Pulsar Max if:

• You have a standard single-phase UK home and want a compact, reliable 7.4kW charger
• You prefer to keep total spend — unit plus install — under £1,100
• Three-phase is a future possibility and you want the option without paying for commercial-grade hardware now

Buy the CTEK Chargestorm Connected 3 if:

• You need MID-approved metering to bill tenants, guests, or employees per kWh
• You require OCPP 2.0.1 back-end management — fleet, workplace, or multi-unit residential
• You have three-phase supply and want the built-in Type B RCD to simplify the consumer unit

For a private driveway, the Wallbox Pulsar Max is the right charger. It costs less than half as much, installs in a fraction of the time, and on single-phase delivers the same 7.4kW. The CTEK is an impressive piece of engineering — built like infrastructure, priced like infrastructure, and best left to the people who need infrastructure.