Su-Kam built India’s first Facebook solar community in 2009 — 143,000 members strong — years before digital marketing became a standard. Kunwer Sachdev on why he bet on social media when the entire industry was still running newspaper ads.
When the United Nations’ WIPO selected Kunwer Sachdev for a feature interview on Indian innovation and IP, it was recognition of Su-Kam’s patent legacy on a global stage. A personal account of what being featured by WIPO taught him about protecting Indian innovation.
How Su-Kam scaled from a single factory to 6 manufacturing plants across Gurgaon, Baddi and Katha. The Reliance-Temasek $10 million investment, the world-class corporate HQ, and the SMF battery factory — a dream project that taught one of the most expensive lessons in Indian manufacturing.
Between 2002 and 2005, Su-Kam launched three innovations that rewrote India’s power backup industry: the first DSP sine wave inverter (with Jagdeep Chauhan), the Solar Home Lighting System, and the ‘Home UPS’ — a new product category that the entire industry adopted within a year. Also: the first BEE 4-star inverter and how an airplane overhead panel inspired our LED indication system.
A customer’s daughter got shocked by a metal inverter. That incident led Kunwer Sachdev to create India’s first plastic-body inverter — the CHIC — which India Today called ‘Innovation of the Decade’. This is also the story of the Fairy Queen, an inverter shaped like a locomotive engine that tragically failed because of one small packaging mistake.
In 1998, a rude service technician told Kunwer Sachdev he wouldn’t understand inverter technology. That insult sparked two years of R&D, exploding MOSFETs, and the birth of India’s first MOSFET-based single-battery inverter. Featuring original photos of the first Su-Kam inverter, the Times of India ‘Digital Wonders’ article, and the R&D lab where it all happened.
Everyone knows Kunwer Sachdev as the Inverter Man of India. But Su-Kam started in 1988 with Cable TV systems — manufacturing CATV amplifiers, installing dish antennas for Doordarshan and the Indian Air Force, and distributing Echostar satellite receivers. This is the untold origin story, with original photographs from the archives.
The untold story of how Su-Kam Power Systems solved the biggest problem with transformer-based Online UPS systems — their massive power consumption. In 2015, we integrated an MPPT solar charge controller that bypasses the main charger, making the double-conversion Online UPS energy efficient without sacrificing the galvanic isolation Indian power conditions demand. Includes real R&D thermal test data and 84.28% efficiency results.
Su-Kam launched India’s first YouTube channel for an inverter company in August 2009 — years before digital video became standard for B2C brands. Kunwer Sachdev on why he went on camera, what he wanted every Indian to understand about energy, and how the whole industry followed within two years.
Kunwer Sachdev on the Baddi factory — tubular gel battery R&D, failure analysis, and why Indian power conditions demanded a test-first culture years before launch.