Easee One vs GivEnergy EV Charger: Budget Brilliance or Battery Brains?

The Lightweight All-Rounder vs the Battery Storage Specialist

These two chargers sit in a fascinating corner of the UK market — both comfortably under £500, both OZEV-approved, and both offering genuinely useful smart features that go beyond basic scheduled charging. Yet they're designed for quite different households, and choosing the wrong one could mean missing out on hundreds of pounds in annual savings.

The Easee One has carved out a reputation as one of the most compact, well-connected chargers you can bolt to a wall. At just 1.5 kg, it's lighter than most laptops, and its built-in lifetime 4G eSIM means it stays online even if your home Wi-Fi wobbles. The GivEnergy EV Charger, on the other hand, is a purpose-built companion for homes with battery storage — capable of charging your Tesla not just from live solar panels, but from energy banked in a home battery hours earlier. That's a trick very few chargers can pull off.

If you're weighing up these two, the real question is this: do you have (or plan to get) a home battery system? Your answer will likely decide everything.

In a nutshell:

• Easee One (£405): The lightest, cheapest smart charger on the market with built-in lifetime 4G connectivity and dynamic load balancing for multi-charger setups.
• GivEnergy EV Charger (£478): The only budget charger that can charge your EV from stored battery energy, making it a game-changer for solar-and-storage households.

Spec Comparison

Power and Charging Speed

Let's address the elephant in the room: neither of these chargers is going to blow your hair back with raw speed. Both are single-phase only, which is what the vast majority of UK homes have anyway. The Easee One edges ahead with a 7.4kW maximum output compared to the GivEnergy's 7kW. In practice, that difference is modest — a 60kWh Tesla Model 3 battery from empty would take roughly 8.1 hours on the Easee One versus about 8.6 hours on the GivEnergy.

For most owners plugging in after the evening commute and waking up to a full battery, that half-hour difference is academic. Where it becomes more noticeable is on shorter overnight windows. If you're on Octopus Go with its 00:30–04:30 off-peak window (four hours at 7.5p/kWh), the Easee One would deliver approximately 29.6kWh in that slot versus 28kWh from the GivEnergy. Both are more than enough for typical daily driving — the average UK motorist covers around 7,400 miles per year, which works out to roughly 6kWh per day in a Tesla Model 3.

Neither charger supports three-phase power, so if you're one of the rare UK households with a three-phase supply and want 22kW charging, you'll need to look elsewhere entirely.

Solar and Battery Integration

This is where the comparison gets genuinely interesting — and where the GivEnergy pulls decisively ahead for the right household. The GivEnergy EV Charger features a dedicated solar divert mode that routes surplus solar generation directly into your car. More impressively, it supports battery-to-EV charging: energy stored in your home battery during the day (or charged overnight on a cheap tariff) can be pushed into your Tesla later. That's a level of energy flexibility that the Easee One simply cannot match — it has no solar integration whatsoever.

If you've already invested in a GivEnergy home battery (or any compatible system), the monitoring portal ties everything together — solar generation, battery state, home consumption, and EV charging — in one place. For a household generating, say, 4,000kWh of solar per year and storing surplus in a battery, the ability to charge an EV from that stored energy could save £300–£400 annually compared to grid-rate charging at typical UK electricity prices.

Without a home battery, however, the GivEnergy's solar divert mode is less distinctive. Several competitors, including the MyEnergi Zappi, offer more sophisticated solar diversion with dedicated eco modes. The GivEnergy's real superpower is the battery-to-EV pathway — remove that from the equation, and much of its appeal fades.

App and Connectivity

The Easee One wins convincingly on connectivity. Its built-in eSIM provides lifetime 4G access at no ongoing cost, with Wi-Fi as a backup. This dual-connectivity approach means the charger stays reachable even during broadband outages — handy if you rely on scheduled charging to hit off-peak tariff windows. The Easee app covers the essentials: scheduled charging, consumption tracking, remote control, and access sharing. As noted by topcharger.co.uk, the charger also supports over-the-air firmware updates via that eSIM connection, so new features arrive without an engineer visit.

The GivEnergy EV Charger relies on Wi-Fi only, which is perfectly adequate for most homes but leaves it vulnerable if your router is at the far end of the house from your driveway. Its app — the GivEnergy monitoring portal — is more of a whole-home energy dashboard than a dedicated EV charging app. That's brilliant if you're managing solar panels and a home battery alongside your charger, but as a standalone EV charging app, reviewers consistently note it's more basic than rivals like Ohme, Tesla, or Hypervolt, as highlighted by warmzilla.co.uk.

Neither charger offers the deep smart tariff integration you get with an Ohme Home Pro — neither will automatically chase the cheapest half-hour slots on Octopus Agile, for instance. Both support basic scheduled charging, so you can manually set them to charge during off-peak hours on tariffs like Octopus Go or British Gas Electric Driver, but you'll be doing the thinking yourself.

Installation and Build Quality

At 1.5 kg, the Easee One is almost comically light. Your installer will thank you — it's a quick, clean job with minimal wall stress, and the integrated RCD Type-B and open PEN protection mean fewer additional components in your consumer unit. As heatable.co.uk notes, it's smaller than an A4 sheet of paper, making it one of the most discreet chargers available. Being untethered, there's no cable dangling from the wall when not in use — though you will need to fetch your own Type 2 cable from the boot each time (Tesla supplies one with most models).

The GivEnergy is a more conventional unit at 4.5 kg with a tethered 5-metre cable permanently attached. The IP65 rating gives it a slight edge over the Easee One's IP54 in truly exposed locations — IP65 means full protection against water jets from any direction, whereas IP54 handles splashing but not direct hosing. For a sheltered driveway or garage wall, both ratings are perfectly fine. The tethered design means you simply grab the cable and plug in — no rummaging in the boot on a rainy Tuesday evening.

Price and Value

The Easee One is £73 cheaper at the unit level, and that gap carries straight through to total installed cost. For a straightforward single-charger, single-car household, it's genuinely hard to beat on value — you're getting lifetime 4G connectivity, dynamic load balancing capability, and integrated safety protection for the lowest price on the market.

The GivEnergy commands a small premium, but if you have a home battery, the value calculation flips entirely. Charging your EV from stored solar or cheap overnight energy — rather than paying 24p+ per kWh at peak grid rates — can recoup that £73 difference within a couple of months.

Who Should Buy Which?

Buy the Easee One if:

• You want the cheapest smart charger with reliable connectivity out of the box
• You don't have solar panels or a home battery system
• You prefer a clean, untethered wall-mounted look
• You might add a second or third charger later (dynamic load balancing supports up to three units)
• You want the simplest, lightest installation possible

Buy the GivEnergy EV Charger if:

• You have a home battery system (GivEnergy or compatible) and want to charge your EV from stored energy
• You have solar panels and want a charger with built-in solar divert mode
• You prefer a tethered charger with the cable always ready to grab
• You're building a whole-home energy ecosystem and want one monitoring portal for everything
• You value IP65 weatherproofing for a fully exposed mounting location

Our recommendation: For the majority of UK households — those without a home battery — the Easee One is the better buy. It's cheaper, lighter, better connected, and offers genuine future-proofing with its multi-charger load balancing. But if you've invested in a home battery system, the GivEnergy EV Charger unlocks a level of energy independence that no other sub-£500 charger can touch. Charging your Tesla from sunshine you captured six hours ago isn't just satisfying — it's genuinely transformative for your running costs. Pick based on your energy setup, not just the sticker price.

For the full specs-level breakdown, see our Easee One vs GivEnergy EV Charger comparison page.

Read our full Easee One review or GivEnergy EV Charger review.

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