A cool, cool partner for the air conditioner

After working for 30 years in the corporate world when the entrepreneurial bug caught Virendra Joshi, he decided to dabble in a clean, green product that would save energy and could be proudly showcased.

This was the Enisaver, an energy saving device designed to go with all air conditioners, whether they were window, split, tower, cassette, ducted or packaged ranging from one tonne to 20 tonnes.

Joshi figured that the air conditioner was close to becoming a necessity in most middle class homes in the country and it was their largest guzzler of power, drawing as much as 60-70 per cent of the energy consumed. So, the small, simple looking, almost pocket size gadget, which could save more than 16 per cent energy without compromising on the comfort cooling of the conditioned space would be his best bet and popular with consumers.

Through his start-up QuasarEnviro Solutions, he introduced the algorithm-based device, which optimises the running of the compressor without any alteration to the cooling comfort, initially for institutional sales. It helped organisations cut back up to 16 to 30 per cent on their energy bill.

“At first there was resistance in the market as there is with any new product,” recalls Joshi. “We did field trials for six months on various brands and sizes of air-conditioners, improved the hardware and software and tested the B-to-B market.”

Soon on his portfolio he had brands such as Jubilant Foodworks, McDonald’s, KFC, HSBC, JCB, Axis Bank, Taj hotels and even State Bank of India using the Enisaver in their premises. Today the company is working as well with Costa Coffee, Dunkin Donuts, Pizza Hut, Dominos, Dell, and Standard Chartered across India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Joshi says there are several problems with ACs that need to be addressed. “My research shows that there are inherent flaws in the ACs because they are always built from a manufacturing and cost perspective. They were never built on the energy efficiency side. The companies are pumping in ACs, which are fairly inefficient. They compromise easily on energy consumption.”

Hence Enisaver is essentially an after-market retrofit electronic control unit that adds intelligence to existing air conditioning systems and improves their efficiency and reduces running costs.

And how does it work? After instalation, the Enisaver detects a system’s saturation point and switches the compressor off. It’s hardware and software ensure that when the system is in this ‘saving mode’, the evaporator fan keeps running so that the system makes maximum use of the stored energy in the cooling coil. Once the stored energy is used up, Enisaver switches the compressor back on so that it can work efficiently again.

Joshi claims that his product saved around 15,429 MW of power in four years, which has resulted into mitigation of 437 million tonnes of Greenhouse emissions that is equivalent to planting of 699 million trees. Currently Joshi is focusing on B-to-B market. “I will get in to B-to-C market after the dealerships in place,” he says.

The product has a life cycle of three years and claims to attain return of investment within a year. It has been tested by the Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Division of Central Power Research Institute, Bengaluru.

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