Five current levels is the feature, not the price
If you take one thing from this review: the reason to buy this charger is not that it is cheap. It is that it publishes 16, 20, 24, 32 and 40 amps, and that turns out to be the most useful spec a budget charger can have.
At home, it decouples the charger from the panel.The usual budget-buyer trap is discovering that the cheap charger needs a 50-amp circuit your service cannot spare, and that the fix is either a service upgrade or a different charger. With five steps you install on whatever circuit you can get and set the charger to match — 24 amps on a 30-amp circuit, 32 on a 40-amp one — and turn it up later if the electrical situation changes. Our panel capacity guide covers the calculation, and our load management guide covers the other ways to avoid a service upgrade.
Away from home, it is a safety margin. A plug tells you the shape of the receptacle, not what is behind the wall. Plenty of 14-50 outlets were installed for an occasional welder or dryer cycle on wiring that has never carried 40 amps for six hours straight. Being able to drop to 24 or 16 amps is the difference between charging conservatively and hoping. Our outlet types guide covers how to read a receptacle, and our RV park guide covers the pedestal case.
For contrast, the Lectron 40A at similar money is fixed at 40, and so is the Lectron Level 2 Tesla. Neither can be used at Level 2 on a 30-amp circuit at all. Our head-to-head works that difference through in full.
IP67 with a published temperature range
IP67 is a strong sealing claim — dust-tight, and rated for temporary immersion rather than merely splashing. On a charger that may end up on an outdoor wall, or in the boot, or on a garage floor in winter, that is worth having.
What makes it more credible is that ELEGRP also publishes a temperature range: −21 to 121°F. Plenty of budget chargers publish a sealing rating and stay silent on temperature, which is the cheaper half of the claim — cold is what makes cables stiff and plastics brittle, and a brand willing to name a floor has committed to something. Our cold-weather guide covers why the cable matters more than the box here.
One caveat that applies to every plug-in charger and gets forgotten on this one: it plugs into a receptacle, and the receptacle has to be outdoor-rated and properly covered for the installation as a whole to be weatherproof. An IP67 charger over an indoor-grade outlet is not an outdoor install.
ETL, and why it is not a lesser listing
This comes up on every budget charger, so it is worth settling. ETL is a mark from a recognized third-party testing laboratory, and an ETL listing certifies a product against the same standards a UL listing does — UL 2594 being the core EVSE standard. The difference is which laboratory did the testing, not the bar it was tested against.
So “ETL certified” on this charger is a real, checkable third-party claim, and it is the specific thing to look for on a low-cost unit. ELEGRP also describes its own PBE technology as full-link overheat protection with a triple-layer safety system; that is manufacturer language for its internal design rather than a certification, and we report it as such rather than treating it as a listing. Our guide on whether cheap EV chargers are safe works through how to separate the two on any listing.
The two-year warranty is the other honest signal here. It is the same term Leviton publishes on a charger costing more than twice as much, and it is two years more than several brands in this registry publish at all.
What you give up
No app, no Wi-Fi, no energy monitoring.The delayed start on the unit — one to twelve hours — covers the practical core of scheduling: don’t start until the cheap rate begins. What it cannot do is adapt, report, or tell you what last month cost at the wall.
We think that is a smaller loss than it sounds, and we have argued the general case in our smart versus basic comparison: your car almost certainly schedules charging natively, it does it well, and running two schedulers is a common cause of a car that quietly did not charge. The genuine exception is wall-side energy metering, which measures what charging actually drew rather than what the car estimated — a real difference, explained in our energy monitoring guide. If you want that number, the Emporia Level 2 is the step up.
Not ENERGY STAR listed.A small permanent standby-energy difference, and a potentially larger rebate consequence: some utility programs name the certification as an eligibility condition, so the cheapest charger is occasionally not the cheapest outcome. Check your own utility before deciding — our ENERGY STAR roundup and our rebates guide cover it.
Forty amps is the ceiling.Not a fault, a category limit. A NEMA 14-50 receptacle sits on a 50-amp circuit, and NEC Article 625 treats charging as a continuous load, so 40 amps is the maximum continuous draw any plug-in charger can offer. More than that means hardwiring — see our 48-amp roundup and our 40A versus 48A comparison, which is worth reading because your car’s own onboard charger limit may make the question moot.
Who should buy it — and who should skip it
Buy it if you want real Level 2 charging for as little as possible without buying blind. It is the most spec-complete cheap charger we cover, the adjustable range makes it fit almost any circuit, the IP67 body and carrying case make it a legitimate travel charger as well as a home one, and the two-year warranty means somebody stands behind it. For a renter, a second car, a holiday home, or a first charger while you work out what you actually need, it is very hard to argue against.
Skip itif you want the charger to measure and report your energy use, in which case pay for a unit that does. Skip it if your utility rebate requires ENERGY STAR, because the rebate may exceed the price difference. And skip it if you have already established that your car can accept more than 9.6 kW and your panel can carry a 60-amp circuit — at that point you are leaving real charging speed on the table, and the WOLFBOX WE48 or the Emporia Level 2 is the better buy.