The Generator’s Territory
Through the mid-2000s, there was a clear and unchallenged boundary in India’s power backup market. Inverters owned the home. Generators owned everything above it.
For a small shop, a factory, a clinic, a mid-sized office — anything that needed more than a few kilowatts for more than a few hours — the answer was diesel. Generators were noisy, required maintenance, consumed fuel at rates that varied with the operator’s honesty, and filled any enclosed space with fumes. Everyone who used them complained about them. Nobody thought there was an alternative.
Kunwer Sachdev thought there was.
The IGBT Problem
Building a high-capacity inverter — five kilowatts and above — was not a straightforward scale-up of the home inverter. The MOSFET transistors that worked well at one or two kilowatts could not handle the switching demands at five. The technology required was IGBT: Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistors, used in industrial motor drives and railway traction systems. Nobody in the Indian inverter industry was using them.
Getting IGBTs in the quantities Su-Kam needed, at a price point that made the product commercially viable, was itself a supply chain challenge. The components were available — but the relationships, the ordering volumes, and the technical knowledge to design around their specific characteristics all had to be built simultaneously.
The R&D team, drawing on Su-Kam’s experience with online UPS technology developed in parallel, worked through the engineering. The result was a 5KVA IGBT-based inverter that could deliver sustained output at commercial loads — something no Indian manufacturer had produced at that scale.
The product existed. The market did not yet know it existed, or why it should care.
Building the Proof
The challenge with generator users was not ignorance. It was justified scepticism. They had been running diesels for years and had calibrated their expectations around diesel’s reliability — which, for all its noise and cost, was genuinely predictable. An inverter salesperson claiming their product could replace a diesel generator was making an extraordinary claim that required extraordinary evidence.
Kunwer’s response was characteristically direct: if the market needed to see it working, he would take it to the market. He commissioned a custom demonstration truck — branded the Power On Wheels — fitted with Su-Kam’s high-capacity inverter, a substantial battery bank, and enough connected load to run a real demonstration for a real audience.
The concept was a travelling showroom. Drive the truck to an industrial area, a commercial district, a generator dealer’s forecourt. Connect the load. Run the inverter. Show the businesspeople standing around it that a machine without a diesel tank, without exhaust, without the noise, could run their equipment for hours.
What the Tour Revealed
The Power On Wheels truck toured extensively. And it worked — in the sense that every demonstration impressed its audience and generated genuine interest. The inverter performed. The leads were real. Generator dealers who saw it understood what they were looking at.
What the tour also revealed, with the clarity that only practical experience provides, was the installation problem.
A 5KVA inverter ran on a battery bank that was large and heavy enough to require professional installation. The batteries alone — twelve-volt units in multiples — could weigh several hundred kilograms. Positioning them, wiring them safely, maintaining them, testing them: this was not something the typical inverter dealer, trained on single-battery home UPS systems, could handle confidently. When dealers took on high-capacity installations without adequate training, the results were inconsistent. Customers complained. Warranties were invoked. Some of the complaints were about the inverter; more of them were about the installation.
The truck’s battery bank itself experienced failures on tour — the same lead-acid limitations that Kunwer was simultaneously working to address through the Battery Management System project. A demonstration that was supposed to show the generator’s replacement occasionally required its own generator to recharge after a heavy demo session. This was not what the marketing material had envisioned.
The Team That Followed the Truck
Kunwer’s response to the installation problem was to build a dedicated service team specifically for high-capacity inverter projects. These were not the standard service engineers who handled home UPS repairs — they were project-grade engineers trained to survey a site, specify the battery configuration, manage the installation, commission the system, and return for maintenance.
Training dealer networks to this standard proved difficult. The inverter trade in 2007 was built around quick sales and quick margins, not multi-day installations and quarterly maintenance visits. The cultural shift required was significant, and it happened slowly.
The Power On Wheels truck eventually retired. The high-capacity inverter business it had launched continued — and grew. Commercial and industrial users who needed reliable backup beyond what the home market provided became a genuine market segment. Su-Kam’s 10KVA, 15KVA, and higher-capacity systems found their way into hospitals, factories, data centres, and commercial complexes.
The generators did not disappear. But they began, for the first time, to share territory.
The Lesson Beyond the Demonstration
What the Power On Wheels tour permanently changed was Kunwer’s understanding of what a new product category required to succeed. Engineering was the entry ticket. Distribution was the operating cost. But a new category — something that asked customers to replace a known solution with an unknown one — required proof delivered at the point of decision. Not a brochure. Not a dealer’s verbal recommendation. A truck in the car park with the load connected and the machine running.
This principle — go to the customer, demonstrate in their context, remove the risk from their imagination — shaped how Su-Kam approached every subsequent product launch in a market that hadn’t been waiting for the product.
The truck was a marketing vehicle. It was also, in its way, a philosophy.