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Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Inverting Power Cuts


When he was 15, and studying in standard X, he would go around localities in Delhi on a bicycle selling pens. Today, he's the reason why many households in India, and especially those in north India, find their summers bearable when power breaks down.
Kunwer Sachdev is the man behind Su-Kam, the inverter brand that's become a household name in many parts of the country. Till Su-Kam came, it was impossible to depend on an inverter because inverter quality was terrible. So people had generators, which was more expensive and also fouled the air, or had both an inverter and generator, so that they could switch to the latter when the former failed.

Sachdev had such an inverter at home. "It was troubling me a lot. One day I opened it up and saw what a mess it was inside. I decided to work on it to improve it." That was the beginning of Su-Kam inverters. Sachdev looked at some inverters from developed markets, figured out the basic building blocks of those, and created an inverter to suit Indian conditions. "In developed countries, inverters are used mostly in solar power and for powering caravans. Those inverters are very different from the kind that is needed to power homes. Besides, India has voltage fluctuation issues, and the neutral in our electrical socket tends to be bad. We had to make our inverters work even in such conditions," Sachdev says.
R&D was central to all that Su-Kam did. Today, its inverter is a high-tech product, with microcontrollers, digital signal processors and software to manage the entire system. "Earlier it was all analog, now it's all digital. In microseconds, the system decides what to do if a power spike happens. In analog based systems, the response rate is slow; in digital it's substantially faster. So failure rates are low," says Sachdev. He thinks that Su-Kam must be the highest patent filer in the inverter industry in the world.

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