I’ve installed and use two different EV charging stations at home and I’ve used, or at least plugged into a couple of others. This hardly makes me an expert, but it does give me some real world experience from which to share my opinions.
All home EV charging stations are pretty much the same, it’s a standardized box and a plug that hooks to 240 volts and either 40 or 60 amps and delivers somewhere between 7 and 9 kilowatts of power to charge your battery. Tesla of course makes it’s own home charging station that has it’s own plug, other than that for all other home EV chargers you’re going to get the J1772 plug.
There are dozens of chargers on the market, but maybe only ten that are from reputable and recognizable manufacturers. In no particular order, the top five brands are JuiceBox, ChargePoint, Clipper Creek, Blink Charging and Bosch. I use a Juicebox at our house in DC and a ChargePoint unit at our home in CT.
It should be noted that as far as I know when you purchase any electric vehicle, a charging unit of some sort comes with it. So you probably don’t need to buy a separate charging unit. With our Audi Etron we received the Audi manufactured unit, which is probably best used as a secondary, or back up portable charger, but can easily be permanently installed in a garage or other “home” location. The Audi charger is relatively compact, light weight and comes with both a 120 and 240 volt plug / adapter.
The Juicebox is by far and away our favorite. It has a really good metal exterior housing, the enclosure is NEMA 4X rated, the highest of any residential EV charging unit. The unit size is small and doesn’t take up a lot of room on the wall. It has a 25 foot cord. The unit has all sorts of wifi bells and whistles, which actually we don’t use, but it’s nice to have incase. It feels sturdy and solid. We went for the hardwired version on the outside of the house.
For our house in Connecticut we installed a Chargepoint residential unit, also Level 2. Honestly, about the same as the Juicebox, looks a little more “modern”, had wifi connectivity, a 25 foot cord. For this one we also did a hardwire install on the outside of the house.