Vehicle-to-Home (V2H) UK: Powering Your House From Your EV

Vehicle-to-home (V2H) lets an electric car send power back into your house — running the kettle, the lights, even the whole property during a power cut — using energy already stored in its battery. It sounds like a free home battery bolted onto a car you already own. In the UK in 2026, it is real technology, but it is also genuinely early: only a handful of chargers support it, the list of compatible cars is short and changes often, and most people asking about “V2H” are actually thinking of vehicle-to-grid (V2G), a related but different thing. This guide separates the two, explains what hardware V2H needs, and gives an honest read on UK availability today.

What V2H actually means

V2H sends energy from the car’s battery straight into your house wiring — it never touches the grid. That is the core distinction from V2G, where energy flows from the car, through the charger, and out onto the public network in exchange for a payment or credit from your energy supplier. V2H just powers your own circuits: appliances, lighting, and (with the right hardware) your whole consumer unit if the grid goes down.

Because V2H energy never crosses the property boundary, it does not need an export tariff or a supplier partnership to work — in principle it can run entirely on your own roof, wall and driveway. In practice, most bidirectional chargers sold in the UK support both V2H and V2G in the same box, so the distinction matters more for how you use the feature than for which product you buy.

V2H vs V2G vs V1G: the three levels

These terms describe how far energy flows, not how “smart” the charging is:

V1G (smart charging) is what most UK EV drivers already have: a charger that shifts charging to a cheap overnight window (for example, on an Octopus Intelligent Go-style tariff) without sending any energy back out of the car. No special hardware beyond a smart charger is required.

V2H (vehicle-to-home) adds the ability to discharge the car’s battery back into the house — running appliances or providing backup power during a cut — without exporting to the grid or needing a buy-back tariff.

V2G (vehicle-to-grid) goes one step further: the car can export power onto the public network, and a supplier pays you (or credits your account) for it. This is the model behind the UK’s only established residential V2G tariff, Octopus Power Pack, covered in full in our V2G guide.

Because a pure V2H setup with no grid export can, in some installer configurations, stay under the simpler G98 connection route, while most bidirectional chargers default to needing the fuller G99 process the moment export capability is present — the practical wiring and DNO paperwork for “V2H-only” and “V2H+V2G” systems can differ. Get written confirmation from your installer of exactly which G98/G99 route your specific charger and DNO application falls under before committing.

What hardware you actually need

A working V2H setup needs three things to line up, and in the UK today that alignment is still rare:

A bidirectional charger. Standard EV chargers are one-way: mains to car only. V2H needs DC bidirectional hardware — in the UK market that currently means chargers such as the Wallbox Quasar 2, which Wallbox’s own UK product page confirms supports both V2H and V2G, charges at up to 12.8 kW DC, and is designed to power a home for multiple days during an outage from a compatible car’s battery. Wallbox does not publish UK retail pricing on that page; expect a bidirectional charger to cost several times more than a standard 7 kW AC wallbox, reflecting the far more complex power electronics inside it.

A compatible car. Bidirectional charging is a two-way handshake between the charger and the vehicle’s battery management system — both have to explicitly support it. Compatibility has expanded since the first CHAdeMO-based Nissan Leaf trials, but it is still a minority of the UK new-car market, and support varies by battery size and even software version within the same model. Treat any “compatible cars” list as a snapshot, not a guarantee, and confirm directly with the manufacturer and charger supplier before ordering hardware.

DNO sign-off. Any device capable of pushing power back through your consumer unit needs the right grid-connection paperwork under the Energy Networks Association’s G98/G99 framework — the same regime that governs solar and battery connections. Your installer handles the application, but it is worth asking upfront whether your specific charger and car combination has a live, type-tested G98/G99 pathway with your DNO, rather than assuming approval will simply follow.

What it is actually for

Two use cases come up repeatedly, and they suit different households:

Power-cut backup. A large EV battery holds far more energy than a typical home battery — a 60–80 kWh pack dwarfs the 5–13 kWh batteries covered in our home battery storage guide. If your bidirectional charger and consumer unit are wired for whole-home backup, that is genuinely useful during a storm-driven outage, in the way a standalone battery with a backup circuit is.

Peak-shaving without a grid tariff. If you are on a time-of-use electricity tariff but do not want to sign up to a V2G export scheme, V2H in principle lets you charge the car overnight on cheap-rate electricity and then run the house from it during the expensive afternoon/evening peak — the same arbitrage logic as a home battery, using the car’s pack instead of buying a separate one.

What it is not, in the UK today, is a mainstream alternative to a purpose-built home battery. Home batteries are a mature product category with established installers, a defined MCS process, and predictable pricing (see our home battery installation guide). V2H hardware, compatible-vehicle lists, and installer experience are all thinner on the ground.

Where this is heading

The UK government’s Electric Vehicle Smart Charging Action Plan treats V2H and V2G together under the umbrella term “V2X” energy, and backs a Vehicle-to-X Innovation Programme (up to £12.6 million across 17 projects) aimed at addressing the barriers to wider deployment. The plan’s own long-range estimate is that V2X could provide around 1,500 GWh of UK storage capacity by 2035, and as much as 60 GW of potential export capacity if every battery-electric vehicle with off-street parking took part — figures that only make sense as a mid-2030s horizon, not a near-term one.

An earlier, related Ofgem-monitored V2G pilot found that bidirectional hardware cost around £3,700 more than an equivalent one-way smart charger at the time, with participants earning up to £725 a year from grid exports — a useful data point on the hardware cost gap, even though it measured export-focused V2G rather than V2H specifically. Expect that premium to narrow only slowly, in line with how far bidirectional hardware volumes scale.

Should you wait or go now?

Go now if you already own (or are about to buy) a car on a confirmed compatible-vehicle list, you want whole-home backup and are willing to pay a premium for still-maturing hardware, and you have an installer who can show you a live G98/G99 approval for your exact combination.

Wait if you mainly want backup power or bill savings and are not tied to a specific car purchase — a standalone home battery, covered in our battery installation guide, is the far more proven route today, with V2H worth revisiting as the compatible-vehicle list and installer base grow.