EV charging + Home Assistant 2026 UK: Zappi vs Ohme vs Hypervolt vs Easee

EV charging and Home Assistant is one of the single highest-return automations you can build.

TL;DR — the bill impact in one paragraph

A typical UK EV holds 50–80 kWh. Full on the April 2026 Ofgem cap (~25p/kWh): £12–£20. Full on a smart EV tariff (Octopus Intelligent Go, Octopus Go, Agile cheap slots) at 5–8p/kWh: £3–£5. That's £9–£16 saved per full charge, and the UK average driver does ~40 full charges a year, so this single automation is worth £300–£500/year per car. Add solar or a home battery and it grows. The rest of this guide is how to make sure every kWh going into the car is the cheapest one available.

At-a-glance: UK charger integration quality

Buy a charger Home Assistant can actually drive — integration quality varies more than the hardware does.

If you haven't bought yet and you know you want HA control: Zappi (solar), Ohme (Intelligent Go), or Wallbox (no-drama official support) are the three to shortlist.

Why the charger's own app isn't enough

Most UK home chargers ship with a perfectly decent app. Zappi, Ohme, Hypervolt, Easee, Andersen A2 — they all have schedulers, most have some form of tariff awareness, and a few have real smart-charging logic. For a single-EV household on a single smart tariff with no solar and no home battery, the charger's own app is usually fine. You set a target time, you set a tariff, you plug in, you walk away.

The trouble starts when the house is doing more than one thing. Solar is exporting at lunchtime and you want the car to soak it up instead of sending it to the grid at the Smart Export Guarantee rate. The home battery is trying to charge during the same cheap slot the car wants. The hot water cylinder, the heat pump and the dishwasher are all fighting for the same four-hour window. The charger's app knows about the charger. It does not know about anything else.

Home Assistant is the coordinator that sits above the charger. It reads the live Octopus price, the solar inverter, the battery state of charge, the car's state of charge, the calendar and whatever else matters, and it tells the charger what to do. The charger still does the charging. Home Assistant just decides when and how fast.

The UK charger landscape and Home Assistant integration status

Not every charger plays nicely with Home Assistant. If you already own one of the big four, you are in good shape. If you are still shopping, integration quality is worth factoring into the decision.

Zappi and Home Assistant

The Zappi is the default choice for anyone with solar, because solar diversion is baked into the hardware. In Eco+ mode it modulates charging current to match live solar export, so you only pull from the grid when there is genuinely nothing else to do. The Home Assistant Zappi integration — CJNE/ha-myenergi in HACS — is excellent. You get sensors for every mode, session kWh, solar contribution and grid import, and you can switch between Fast, Eco and Eco+ from an automation. It is the most mature charger integration on the platform.

Ohme and Home Assistant

Ohme is the charger Octopus themselves push hardest, because of the deep Intelligent Octopus Go integration — Octopus schedules the charge directly via Ohme's cloud. The Home Assistant Ohme integration (dan-r/HomeAssistant-Ohme in HACS) is less mature than MyEnergi's, but it exposes session data, charge state and basic controls. For Intelligent Octopus Go households, Ohme plus Home Assistant is a strong combination: Octopus handles the cheap-rate scheduling, Home Assistant coordinates everything else in the house around it.

Hypervolt

Hypervolt has a solid HACS integration that exposes session data, schedules and charge state. It does not do hardware-level solar diversion the way a Zappi does, but Home Assistant can emulate it reasonably well by watching solar export and starting, stopping or throttling the charger in response. Expect a more stepped experience than the Zappi's smooth modulation.

Easee

Easee has a well-regarded community integration installed through HACS, and the charger itself is known for proper dynamic load balancing across multiple units — useful if you end up with two EVs and a single-phase supply. No native solar diversion, but again Home Assistant can do the thinking. The cloud API is a little more limited than MyEnergi's, so some of the finer-grained controls are not exposed.

Andersen, Podpoint, Wallbox and the rest

Integration here is more mixed. Andersen A2 has no first-class Home Assistant integration at time of writing. Podpoint is cloud-locked with only a limited community component. Wallbox does have an official core Home Assistant integration — narrower than Zappi or Easee's coverage but genuinely supported. If you have not bought a charger yet and you know you want to run it through Home Assistant, Zappi, Ohme, Hypervolt, Easee or Wallbox are all safe bets.

Three automations worth building

Once the charger is talking to Home Assistant, the obvious question is what to do with it. Three automations cover most of the benefit for most households.

Charge only during cheap Agile or Go slots

This is the baseline. Pull in the current rate from the Octopus Energy integration (covered in more detail in the Octopus Agile guide), set a threshold — say 10p/kWh — and enable charging below it, disable above it. On Octopus Go, that threshold is trivially satisfied during the off-peak window and fails the rest of the time. On Agile it flexes with the market, so you might get a cheap slot in the middle of a windy afternoon as well as the usual overnight dip.

A small but important note for Intelligent Octopus Go customers: you do not want Home Assistant fighting Octopus for control of the charger. Intelligent schedules the charge itself, sometimes outside the nominal off-peak window, because Octopus is optimising against the grid. Let it. Use Home Assistant to read Octopus's dispatch sensors, not to override them.

Solar-priority charging

When solar export exceeds the minimum charging current — around 1.4 kW for a single-phase 6A charger — start the car charging and modulate the current up or down to match what is available. Zappi does this natively in Eco+ and needs no help. For Hypervolt, Easee and others, Home Assistant watches the grid import/export sensor from your inverter or a clamp meter, calculates the spare solar, and adjusts the charge rate or toggles the session.

This is worth real money if you have a 4 kWp or larger array. Every kWh the car takes directly from the roof is a kWh you would otherwise have exported at a Smart Export Guarantee rate of around 12p (Octopus Outgoing Fixed dropped from 15p to 12p in March 2026), and it offsets a kWh you would otherwise have bought back later at somewhere between 5p and 25p depending on tariff and time of day. The maths almost always favours self-consumption. The solar guide covers the sensor side of this in more detail.

Trip-aware charging

The one most people never build, and the one most worth it for mixed-use households. The pattern: by default, charge to 80% to protect the battery. If a long trip is planned for tomorrow — read from a calendar, a helper input, or a trip planner — charge to 100% instead. Home Assistant decides the target state of charge and sends it to the charger, or to the car directly if the car has an API (Tesla and BMW both expose one).

For a car used daily for short commutes and occasionally for 300-mile motorway runs, this single automation both extends battery life and removes the "damn, I forgot to set it to 100%" panic the night before a journey. It is the kind of thing you would never get from the charger's own app.

Octopus Intelligent Go — the special case

Intelligent Octopus Go deserves its own paragraph because it changes the calculation. With Intelligent, you tell Octopus your car, your charger and your target state of charge and ready-by time, and Octopus schedules the actual charging against its own view of the grid. In return you get cheap off-peak rates — currently in the region of 5-7p/kWh — across a longer effective window than plain Octopus Go, because dispatches outside the nominal off-peak hours are also billed at the off-peak rate.

For a single-EV household with no home battery, Intelligent Octopus Go is usually the right answer, and Home Assistant's role is supporting rather than leading. The Octopus integration exposes the dispatch windows as sensors, which means the rest of your house — the home battery, the hot water tank, the dishwasher — can ride along on the same cheap slots the car gets. If you also run a home battery, this coordination is where the real money is.

For multi-EV households, or households with large solar arrays and batteries, Agile often edges ahead because it gives Home Assistant full control to optimise everything together. There is no single right answer — it depends on your kit.

What can break

This is the honest section. EV charging automation is powerful and it is also, periodically, fragile. A few things worth knowing.

Charger firmware updates occasionally break the app and the Home Assistant integration at the same time. It is not common, but it is not rare either. Budget for roughly a day of weirdness per charger per year where something stops reporting correctly or a control stops responding, and a community integration update lands a few days later to fix it. In the meantime your car still charges — the hardware does not stop working — but your automations may need a manual nudge.

The car's own state of charge might not match what the charger thinks. Chargers estimate state of charge from the kWh they have delivered, not from what the car reports, and the two drift. If your car exposes an API — Tesla, BMW, Polestar, Hyundai/Kia via Bluelink, Volkswagen via We Connect — use the car's own value in your automations rather than trusting the charger's estimate. It is the difference between "charge to 80%" actually meaning 80%, and meaning "somewhere in the low 70s, probably".

Smart tariff changes can invalidate old automations overnight. When Octopus adjusts the pricing structure — and they do, periodically — your 10p/kWh threshold might suddenly match no slots at all, or every slot. Review your tariff-linked automations whenever you get a tariff change email. It takes five minutes and it will save you from the nasty surprise of a full day-rate charge at 30p/kWh because your logic never fired.

Finally: watch out for Home Assistant updates and integration updates landing in the same week as a charger firmware push. Stagger them if you can. Restore from backup is your friend when it all goes sideways at once.

The lazy option

All of the above is buildable in a weekend if you enjoy that sort of thing. Most EV owners do not. If what you actually want is a car that charges on the cheapest electricity available, soaks up your solar when the sun is out, and does not need thinking about, and you would rather not wrestle with integration updates the week before a long drive — that is what the habbb managed service is for. We set up the charger integration, write the automations, and keep them working through firmware and tariff changes.

For the wider picture of how EV charging fits with heating, solar and the rest of your energy footprint, start with the umbrella guide on saving money with Home Assistant. The EV is usually the single biggest line item, but it is rarely the only one worth automating.