By a former associate of Kunwer Sachdev
In the early 2000s, buying an inverter for your home meant finding a dark, unventilated corner of the house to hide a heavy, humming iron box. They were treated like utility meters or plumbing fixtures — utilitarian, loud, and entirely industrial.
Kunwer Sachdev looked at the living rooms of modern Indian homes and saw a glaring mismatch. Why should a device powering delicate televisions and computers look like it belonged in a roadside mechanic’s garage?
Challenging the industrial aesthetic
Fresh off the design disruption of the CHIC plastic-body casing, Sachdev pushed his design and engineering teams toward a new objective: making power backup products look and feel like consumer electronics.
Former R&D associates recall the disbelief in the engineering department when he first sketched out the concept for what would become the Trendy series.
“Consumers don’t want a black metal box next to their sofa,” Sachdev argued. “They want to know what their machine is doing. Give them a screen.”
Up until that point, indicator lights on inverters consisted of crude, glowing red and green LEDs that offered very little diagnostic clarity. When a battery was low or an overload occurred, users were left guessing.
The microcontroller and LCD breakthrough
To solve this, Sachdev’s team integrated a smart microcontroller linked directly to a clean liquid crystal display (LCD). For the first time in the Indian power backup sector, a domestic inverter could communicate with its user in real time.
The Trendy display showed critical operational metrics at a glance:
- Battery charge level — precise visual bars tracking energy storage.
- Load percentage — real-time feedback on how many appliances were drawing power.
- Fault warnings — explicit indicators for overload, short-circuit, or low battery voltage, reducing unnecessary panic and service calls.
That same instinct — that the machine should speak plainly to the household — sat alongside the category work of the Home UPS and the cleaner power of DSP sinewave. Design and diagnostics were not ornament. They were how trust was built when the lights went out.
Changing market standards
Competitors initially dismissed the LCD display as an unnecessary, high-cost gimmick that would fail under fluctuating Indian voltage conditions. Yet when the Trendy series hit the market, consumer response was immediate. Homeowners preferred a device that sat neatly next to entertainment centres and provided clear diagnostic data.
Within two years, major regional competitors were scrambling to source similar display panels and redesign their casing moulds.
Those of us who watched the R&D floors remember the pattern: first the scepticism, then the scramble to copy. It was the same sequence that followed plastic bodies and, later, the denser patent record told in The Patent Obsession.
Archival context & related chapters
The Trendy series was part of a broader design philosophy that treated home power electronics not as dead-weight hardware, but as appliances people would keep in sight.
- CHIC plastic inverter — India Today Innovation of the Decade
- Home UPS — the category Kunwer named
- India’s first DSP sinewave inverter
- The Patent Obsession — 106 filings
- Full searchable register: solarmanofindia.com/patents
Archival note: This retrospective is compiled from recollection of former associates who worked alongside Su-Kam R&D and product teams during the period described, alongside publicly discussed launch history. Historical product specifications reflect the technology standards of their respective deployment periods.
Disclaimer
Kunwer Sachdev is no longer associated with Su-Kam Power Systems Ltd. References to Su-Kam here are historical and biographical. His current work continues through Su-vastika and related ventures.
InverterManOfIndia is an independent third-party editorial site. It is not owned, operated, sponsored, or endorsed by Su-Kam Power Systems Ltd., Su-vastika Systems Pvt. Ltd., or related parties.
Editorial Note · Independent Coverage
This article is part of an independent editorial series on invertermanofindia.com. It is written by a former associate of Kunwer Sachdev, drawing on first-hand observation during the period described. It is not authored, ghost-written, edited or approved by Mr. Kunwer Sachdev, by Su-Kam Power Systems Ltd. as the company exists today, or by any current entity he leads. The views, framing and interpretations are the writer's alone. Full independence and dissociation policy: /disclaimer.
Disclaimer: invertermanofindia.com is an independent editorial legacy site.