myenergi Zappi GLO vs Easee One: solar brain or cheapest wall?

The £345 question is whether you own solar panels

This is not a close fight on paper, but it's the wrong fight for most buyers. The myenergi Zappi GLO at £750 is a solar diverter that happens to charge cars. The Easee One at £405 is the cheapest mainstream charger on the UK market, and little more. £345 separates them, and almost all of that gap is panels on your roof.

• myenergi Zappi GLO — buy it if, and only if, you have solar.
• Easee One — the default cheap option when you don't.

When the Zappi GLO earns its £750

Eco+ mode is the reason this charger exists. It watches your solar export in real time and diverts only the surplus into the car — free electrons off the roof, no grid import. Pair it with the eddi for hot water and the libbi for battery storage, and the myenergi Zappi GLO becomes the conductor of a whole-house energy system. That is a useful thing to own if you've already spent £8,000 on panels.

Without solar, the £750 buys you: a tethered 6.5-metre cable, a 22kW three-phase option most UK homes can't use, RFID for 126 users you don't have, and an app-only interface (the on-unit screen from the older Zappi 2.1 is gone). Strip the solar feature out and the Zappi GLO is an expensive, mid-smart charger beaten on tariff integration by the cheaper Ohme Home Pro and on price by almost everything else in the catalogue.

If solar is the reason you're here, the more direct comparison is the Ohme vs Zappi GLO page — that's where the tariff-versus-solar argument actually lives.

What £405 gets you from the Easee One

A lot more than the price suggests. The Easee One ships with a Type B RCD and open-PEN detection built in — protection that usually adds £100–£200 to install labour when the charger doesn't have it. It has a lifetime 4G eSIM, so schedules keep running when your Wi-Fi doesn't. At 1.5 kg, it's the lightest mount in this catalogue by some distance. Total installed, on a clean job, lands near £700.

The compromises are real but narrow. It's single-phase only — no 22kW route if your property is one of the few with three-phase. It's untethered, so you carry the cable and plug it in every time; the wall stays tidy, your hands don't. IP54 rather than the Zappi's IP65, though either handles a British winter without drama. And scheduling is manual, not API-driven — fine on a fixed window like Octopus Go or E.ON Next Drive, less clever on Octopus Agile.

For a flat-rate or fixed-window tariff household without solar, nothing in the catalogue makes a stronger case on price than this. If you want smarter tariff handling at the same sort of money, the Ohme ePod at £409 is the pivot — same untethered shape, proper tariff integration, £4 more.

The grant, briefly

Both are OZEV-approved. If you rent or own a flat, the £500 grant applies. On the Easee One, £500 wipes out the £405 unit price and contributes to install costs too. On the Zappi GLO, it knocks the £750 down to £250 — which shifts the arithmetic considerably if you're a flat-dweller with solar on a shared roof, though that is a narrow Venn diagram.

The verdict

Buy the myenergi Zappi GLO if:

• You already have solar panels, or are installing them
• You want the eddi/libbi ecosystem for whole-house energy management
• You need 22kW three-phase and your supply can deliver it

Buy the Easee One if:

• You don't have solar
• You want the cheapest defensible charger on a UK wall
• You're on a fixed-window tariff and manual scheduling is enough

If a charger is going on my wall and there are no panels above it, the Easee One every time — £405, integrated protection, a 4G eSIM, and done. If the panels are there, the myenergi Zappi GLO is the tool built for the job, and the £345 premium is the price of using your roof properly. The mistake is buying the Zappi for the badge and running it on grid electricity. That's £345 spent on a feature you never switch on.