I’m one of those weirdos who bought an electric car without anywhere to plug it in. So I’ve dealt with a lot of dumb EV-charging drama.
For years I routinely sat in my car at a public charger for hours at a time, often sweating or freezing and holding my bladder. (There’s no fast-charging option on this old EV.)
Eventually I moved into a house with a driveway, and I could finally plug in at home. But the saga didn’t end there.
My first at-home charger was $550, and it connected to Wi-Fi, which promised to help me tinker with the charging schedules and track my energy use. But it was glitchy and inconsistent for much of its short life—and it failed completely within two years.
I’d had enough. So I replaced it with the Grizzl-E Classic, a dead-simple charger built to be durable. I’ve never thought so little about charging my car, and that’s exactly how it should be.
Budget pick
Like a lot of EV chargers, the Grizzl-E charges quickly at up to 40 amps and has a 24-foot cord. It’s fully weatherproofed and doesn’t waste anybody’s time with pointless connectivity features.
An EV charger is one product that just doesn’t need to be smart. EVs might represent the future, but today, my EV is just my car; I need it to get groceries and to pick up my kid after school. The simpler the charger, the less likely something will go wrong, and the more likely I can just drive.
Besides, most EVs already connect to the internet through a companion app that does all the same stuff as any charger’s smart features. You’re better off using your car’s app because you probably already have it installed and are familiar with the features, says senior staff writer Sarah Witman, writer of our EV charger guide, where the Grizzl-E Classic is featured as the budget pick.
Look at Wirecutter’s best USB phone chargers: They have no smart features, but you’ll wake up to a fully charged phone every morning without fail. An EV charger is basically a phone charger with a thicker, longer cable and some extra fire protection.
When I initially bought the smart charger, I thought that the scheduling feature might come in handy, but it wasn’t any better than my car’s app and its scheduling feature. (Plus, where I live—as with many places in the US—there’s no such thing as off-peak electricity rates, so I don’t save any money by delaying when I charge.)
On top of that, my utility company had promised some incentives if I enrolled my smart charger in a program that allowed the company to control the charging speeds when the grid was under stress. They closed the enrollment after I bought the charger but before I installed it. (Thanks, guys!) When I looked at the details more critically, the rebates weren’t that great anyway, and I should’ve just bought a cheaper charger to begin with.
What about the ways that my old EV-charger app could have helped me monitor and manage my energy use? I paid attention for about a year, but then I got solar panels, and now all my electricity is free, so I just don’t care.
If I were a real energy nerd and wanted to make the most of a solar battery or other rebates and incentives, I would probably install a smart panel or whole-house energy monitor. That way I would be able to deal with my EV charger, water heater, HVAC, and all the other big stuff, in a single app. (Again, under my utility company and many others around the country, there’s no meaningful financial benefit to doing so.)
The Grizzl-E does have one significant weakness: If you want or need to toggle the power output, the steps aren’t especially intuitive. (The directions start on page 11 in the manual, and technically you need a torque wrench to do it correctly.) If you set the output too low, your car charges more slowly than it needs to. If you set it too high for the electrical circuit that it’s connected to, you’ll keep tripping the circuit breaker—and it’s simply not a safe practice. If you have any doubts, just have an electrician handle it for you. If you’re hiring a pro to run new wiring anyway, they can handle this step as part of the initial setup.
You can find other simple EV chargers, and some of them cost less than the Grizzl-E. I picked the Grizzl-E because of its ridiculous weatherproofing and great owner ratings.
I probably don’t even need as much weatherproofing as the Grizzl-E has, even parking outdoors in Massachusetts. (My parents live nearby and have had a couple of plastic, also-featureless ClipperCreek EV chargers in their driveway for a decade, and those still work just fine.)
Whatever. I’m happy to pay extra for the metal case and the heavy-duty seals and the super-thick cord that doesn’t get too stiff in cold weather. I’ll be driving electric cars for the rest of my life, I’ll need a charger, and this thing looks like it stands a chance of holding up for a really long time. I guess you’ll have to ask me in 10 or 20 years how it worked out.
This article was edited by Megan Beauchamp and Maxine Builder.
