It started as
an instinct
In 2012 I wanted to do something in energy conservation. That was the whole of it. There was no plan to build machines, and no plan to build them in India. Both came later.
How that became a factory at Asangaon is a longer story, and not a straight one.
What matters is where it landed. Sunniva draws and builds its own machines under one roof — the design, the cabinet, the assembly and the test. The range runs from a cylinder sized for a house to two hundred kilowatts of process heat, and as high as ninety-five degrees.
That was not the cheap way to do it. It is far easier to import a machine, put a badge on it and sell it, and a good part of this industry does exactly that. Building them ourselves means we can make a machine for the job in front of us instead of selling whatever is nearest in a catalogue.
And when something goes wrong on a site, the person who can fix it works here.
How we work
Four things we hold to. Each of them is checkable — that is the only reason they are worth printing.
We say what the machine will do
A heat pump is bought on its numbers, and numbers are easy to flatter. We publish what a machine has been tested at. Where we do not have the data, the page says so instead of filling the gap with something plausible. A quotation won on an optimistic COP is lost again at commissioning, and it costs more to lose it there.
The right technology, properly designed
The right machine for a job is not always the one we would most like to sell, and finding it takes longer than reading a catalogue. That is why the sizing tools are open to anyone, with no form to fill in first. We do not cut a design to reach a price — a machine that meets the number on paper and not on site has failed, whatever it cost.
Open the calculatorsWhen it goes wrong, it is ours
Machines fail. Sites turn up conditions nobody predicted. Commissioning does not always land where it was meant to. When that happens the useful question is not whose fault it is — we built it, so it is ours to put right. We would also rather record a result that fell short of its target than quietly leave it out.
Four groups have to be able to rely on us
The partners who sell the machines, the people who build them, the clients who run them, and the bodies that regulate all three. They are not in competition with each other, and a shortcut taken with any one of them is paid for by the other three. So a partner should know exactly what they get from us: the technology, the pricing, the marketing, and a technical desk that answers. A dealer who cannot get an answer cannot sell a heat pump twice.
The commitment behind all of it has not changed since the instinct. A machine we ship should cut the energy someone was burning, pay for itself in a period they can plan around, and leave less carbon behind than the thing it replaced. If it does not do those three, we have not done our job.
There is a great deal still to build.
It started as
an instinct
In 2012 I wanted to do something in energy conservation. That was the whole of it. There was no plan to build machines, and no plan to build them in India. Both came later.
How that became a factory at Asangaon is a longer story, and not a straight one.
What matters is where it landed. Sunniva draws and builds its own machines under one roof — the design, the cabinet, the assembly and the test. The range runs from a cylinder sized for a house to two hundred kilowatts of process heat, and as high as ninety-five degrees.
That was not the cheap way to do it. It is far easier to import a machine, put a badge on it and sell it, and a good part of this industry does exactly that. Building them ourselves means we can make a machine for the job in front of us instead of selling whatever is nearest in a catalogue.
And when something goes wrong on a site, the person who can fix it works here.
How we work
Four things we hold to. Each of them is checkable — that is the only reason they are worth printing.
We say what the machine will do
A heat pump is bought on its numbers, and numbers are easy to flatter. We publish what a machine has been tested at. Where we do not have the data, the page says so instead of filling the gap with something plausible. A quotation won on an optimistic COP is lost again at commissioning, and it costs more to lose it there.
The right technology, properly designed
The right machine for a job is not always the one we would most like to sell, and finding it takes longer than reading a catalogue. That is why the sizing tools are open to anyone, with no form to fill in first. We do not cut a design to reach a price — a machine that meets the number on paper and not on site has failed, whatever it cost.
Open the calculatorsWhen it goes wrong, it is ours
Machines fail. Sites turn up conditions nobody predicted. Commissioning does not always land where it was meant to. When that happens the useful question is not whose fault it is — we built it, so it is ours to put right. We would also rather record a result that fell short of its target than quietly leave it out.
Four groups have to be able to rely on us
The partners who sell the machines, the people who build them, the clients who run them, and the bodies that regulate all three. They are not in competition with each other, and a shortcut taken with any one of them is paid for by the other three. So a partner should know exactly what they get from us: the technology, the pricing, the marketing, and a technical desk that answers. A dealer who cannot get an answer cannot sell a heat pump twice.
The commitment behind all of it has not changed since the instinct. A machine we ship should cut the energy someone was burning, pay for itself in a period they can plan around, and leave less carbon behind than the thing it replaced. If it does not do those three, we have not done our job.
There is a great deal still to build.