myenergi Zappi GLO vs GivEnergy EV Charger

The £155 between your roof and your battery

The myenergi Zappi GLO and the GivEnergy EV Charger look, on paper, like competitors. Both are tethered, IP65-rated, 7kW on single-phase, three-year warranty. Both talk about solar. Both cost less than £600. But they answer fundamentally different questions — and the £155 gap between them (£599 vs £444) is almost beside the point. What matters is the hardware already bolted to your house.

• Zappi GLO — the solar-surplus charger. Eco+ mode feeds the car only from what the panels are generating, nothing from the grid. £599.
• GivEnergy EV Charger — the battery-discharge charger. Pulls stored energy from a home battery into the car, not just live solar. £444.

If you have panels but no battery, the Zappi. If you have a battery — GivEnergy's own or a compatible third-party unit — the GivEnergy. If you have both, read on.

What the Zappi GLO does that the GivEnergy cannot

Three solar modes — Fast, Eco, and Eco+. Fast ignores the panels and draws from the grid at full rate. Eco blends solar and grid to maintain a minimum charge speed. Eco+ waits. It sits idle until there is enough surplus from the roof to charge the car entirely for free, then starts, then pauses again if a cloud drifts over. No grid import. No cost.

That patience is the Zappi's entire value proposition. The GivEnergy has a solar divert mode, but it is a simpler implementation — and more importantly, it is not why anyone buys the GivEnergy. The GivEnergy's trick runs in the other direction: stored energy out of a battery, into the car. Most chargers, the Zappi included, can only use live generation. The GivEnergy can pull cheap overnight electricity that a home battery absorbed at 8.5p/kWh on Octopus Go and push it into the car the following afternoon. That is a different kind of free — or near enough.

Smart tariff support is a draw — and a weakness for both

Neither charger has a live supplier API. Both handle off-peak scheduling: set a window, the charger obeys. On a fixed-window tariff like Octopus Go (8.5p/kWh, 00:30–05:30) or EDF GoElectric (6.99p/kWh, 23:00–06:00), that is sufficient. The charger does not need to be clever; it needs to turn on and off at the right times.

On Octopus Agile, where rates shift every thirty minutes, both are out of their depth. Neither can chase half-hourly pricing. If variable-rate optimisation matters to you, the Ohme Home Pro at £539 sits between the two on price and handles Agile natively. For a fuller comparison on that front, the Ohme vs Zappi GLO page lays it out.

The ecosystem question

myenergi sells an ecosystem: the Zappi GLO for the car, the eddi for hot-water diversion, the libbi for battery storage. They talk to each other through the myenergi app, and the system decides where surplus goes — car first, then hot water, then battery, or whatever priority you set. If you are building a myenergi household, the Zappi is not optional; it is the front door.

GivEnergy sells an ecosystem too — inverters, batteries, the monitoring portal. The EV charger slots into that portal and lets you see generation, storage, and car charging in one place. Battery-to-EV is the headline, but whole-home visibility is the quieter benefit. If your inverter and battery are already GivEnergy, adding their charger is the path of least friction.

The awkward case: you have solar panels and a GivEnergy battery. The Zappi GLO diverts live surplus better. The GivEnergy discharges stored energy better. You cannot have both features in one box. The pragmatic answer is usually to let the battery handle overnight tariff arbitrage and let the car charge from the battery via the GivEnergy unit — the stored-energy route covers more use cases than waiting for sunshine.

The grant arithmetic

Both are OZEV-approved. For eligible renters and flat owners, the £500 grant covers the GivEnergy's £444 unit price outright and chips into the install. For the Zappi GLO at £599, the grant brings the effective hardware cost to £99 before installation. Either way, the grant narrows the gap to the point where the £155 difference barely registers — your renewable setup, not the price, should decide.

Which to buy

Buy the myenergi Zappi GLO if:

• You have solar panels and want to charge entirely from surplus generation
• You are building — or already own — a myenergi ecosystem with eddi or libbi
• You want the option of 22kW three-phase charging down the line

Buy the GivEnergy EV Charger if:

• You have a home battery and want to discharge stored cheap-rate electricity into the car
• Your inverter and monitoring are already GivEnergy
• You do not have solar panels and want a competent £444 tethered charger without paying for solar logic you will never use

For the majority of buyers landing on this page — people with some form of renewable hardware at home — the decision is already made by what is on the wall. Panels point to the Zappi GLO. A battery points to the GivEnergy. If you have neither, both chargers are overqualified for the job, and something like the Ohme Home Pro or the VCHRGD Seven Pro will serve you better for less.