Wallbox Pulsar Max vs Easee One

£24 on the sticker, £100+ on the invoice

The Wallbox Pulsar Max costs £513. The Easee One costs £489. On paper that is a £24 gap — close enough to call a rounding error. But the real difference is what happens when the electrician opens your consumer unit.

• Wallbox Pulsar Max — tethered, compact (198 × 201 × 99 mm), five-year warranty, 22kW three-phase option. Needs an external Type B RCD and PEN fault device fitted during install.
• Easee One — untethered, featherweight (1.5 kg), three-year warranty, single-phase only. Ships with Type B RCD and open-PEN detection built in.

That internal protection is the load-bearing fact of this comparison. Everything else is secondary.

The install cost inverts the price

A standard UK install runs £400–£600, but a significant chunk of that labour — often £100–£200 — is the cost of fitting the additional protective devices the regulations demand. The Easee One has them inside the box. The Wallbox does not. Once the sparks has packed up and left, the Easee is typically the cheaper charger total, despite its higher unit price. On an older consumer unit with limited spare ways, the saving can be larger still.

Both chargers are OZEV-approved, so eligible renters and flat owners can claim the £500 grant. At £489 the Easee's unit price is covered almost entirely by the grant, leaving the full £500 to absorb install costs. The Wallbox at £513 leaves a £13 balance before install begins — trivial, but the Easee edges it.

Tethered versus untethered — the daily trade-off

The Wallbox arrives with a 5-metre Type 2 cable permanently attached. You pull it off the holster, plug it into the car, done. The Easee is a socket on the wall. You carry a cable from the boot, connect both ends, then reverse the process when you leave. Every time.

For a single-car household with a dedicated parking spot, the tethered Wallbox is simply more pleasant to use — especially in the dark, in the rain, when the novelty of EV ownership has worn thin. The Easee's untethered design has its own logic: the wall looks cleaner when the car is away, and if you own two EVs with different cable lengths you can swap as needed. But convenience favours the Wallbox here, and a separate cable costs £50–£150 on top of the Easee's £489.

Neither charger is clever about tariffs

This is the shared weakness. Both the Wallbox and the Easee offer scheduled charging — set a start time, set a stop time, forget about it. That is fine on a fixed off-peak window like Octopus Go (8.5p/kWh, 00:30–05:30) or EDF GoElectric (6.99p/kWh, 23:00–06:00). You programme the slot once and the charger obeys.

On anything variable — Octopus Agile, where rates shift every half hour — neither charger can follow the price. The Wallbox does support Intelligent Octopus Go through its app, which is a point in its favour: 8p/kWh across a six-hour window with the supplier managing the schedule. The Easee has no equivalent integration. If smart-tariff optimisation matters to you, both chargers are outclassed by the Ohme Home Pro at £539 — £50 more than the Easee, £26 more than the Wallbox — which talks directly to suppliers and chases half-hourly rates on its own. That comparison is covered in detail on the Ohme Home Pro vs Easee One page.

Size, weight, and the three-phase question

The Wallbox is the smaller box — 198 × 201 × 99 mm, roughly the footprint of a hardback novel. At 4.2 kg it is not heavy, but the Easee at 1.5 kg is startlingly light. If you are mounting on a thin partition wall or a timber frame, weight matters.

The Wallbox offers a 22kW three-phase option. Fewer than 5% of UK homes have three-phase supply, but if yours does — or if you are fitting a charger at commercial premises — the Wallbox is the only one of this pair that can use it. The Easee is locked to single-phase, 7.4kW. For the overwhelming majority of UK driveways, that is identical output, and the three-phase capability is irrelevant.

The Wallbox also carries a five-year warranty against the Easee's three. Two extra years of cover for £24 more on the unit — though, again, the total installed cost likely favours the Easee.

Which to buy

Buy the Easee One if:

• You want the lowest total installed cost in this pair
• Your consumer unit is tight on space or spare ways
• You prefer an untethered socket for a cleaner wall

Buy the Wallbox Pulsar Max if:

• You want a tethered cable and the daily convenience that brings
• Your property has three-phase supply
• Five years of warranty matters more than saving on install

For a single-phase home with a straightforward consumer unit, the Easee One is the more rational purchase. Its built-in protection wipes out the Wallbox's £24 unit-price advantage and then some. The Wallbox earns its place on a tight wall, a three-phase supply, or for anyone who simply does not want to carry a cable every evening. Neither charger is the right pick if tariff intelligence is the priority — that money is better spent on the Ohme Home Pro.