Where a home-energy product is really decided

Most of our customers live in towns that rarely appear in market-research panels, and they buy through a retailer who also sells fans, wiring and LED bulbs. I built our research practice around that reality. Each quarter our product managers and designers spend four days in a town such as Sitapur, Hajipur or Dharmapuri with retailers, technicians and households, and they bring back evidence rather than impressions: the evening load a household actually runs, how long its inverter battery lasts during a cut, what its last six electricity bills show and who in the family decides. We also study operating data from about 2.3 lakh connected Dhruvanta inverters, shared with their owners' consent, to see when outages fall. That work told us something national surveys missed. In many towns supply has improved overall, but the outages that remain cluster between six and eleven at night. It shaped our hybrid inverter, our battery sizing and the way our retailers now open a sales conversation.

A subsidised residential rooftop system passes through several hands after we have installed it. Under the central government's residential rooftop programme, launched in February 2024, the household applies through a national portal, the distribution company checks technical feasibility, a vendor registered in that discom's area installs the system, the discom inspects it and fits a bidirectional net meter, and only then is the subsidy paid into the household's own bank account. State electricity regulatory commissions set much of the detail of net metering, so the journey differs from state to state. I treat that whole sequence as part of our product. Our app tracks nine steps for every file, our liaison desks work in eleven distribution areas, and we report the median days from installation to net meter and to subsidy credit to our board every quarter. A customer still waiting for a net meter three months after paying us has not yet received what we sold.

Many of our customers sit near the end of long rural or semi-urban feeders, where voltage can swing well outside its nominal range during the day and sag in the evening. Products designed for a stable urban supply trip, overheat or quietly lose generation there. I set our design requirements from field data rather than laboratory norms: a wide input-voltage window, ride-through for brief interruptions, export settings that respect the discom's connection conditions and battery charging that survives months of shallow cycling. Our hybrid inverters accept up to three kilowatts of panels, so a backup customer can add solar later without replacing the inverter. Inverters, modules and batteries must also meet the Bureau of Indian Standards registration requirements that apply to them, and I do not allow a launch date to move ahead of certification. The largest question in my portfolio is now the battery: when lithium iron phosphate becomes the default for a household, and when tubular lead-acid remains the honest recommendation.

Most of our customers borrow to buy a rooftop system, so the loan is part of the product whether we lend or not. We work with two regulated lending partners. Under the RBI's digital lending guidelines, a loan is disbursed and repaid directly between the borrower's account and the lender's, and the borrower receives a key fact statement before signing; our app hands the customer to the lender's own journey at that point instead of standing in the middle of the money. I price systems at their full cost before any subsidy, and we size each household loan to its expected bill saving and its evening backup needs rather than to the largest system it could be persuaded to buy. For small factories the rule is stricter: the instalment must stay within 80 per cent of the expected monthly saving on the factory's current tariff. That rule has cost us larger orders. It has also kept our partners' arrears low enough for them to keep lending in the towns where we most need them.

A rooftop system is assembled on the customer's roof by people we do not directly employ, and that is where most of its twenty-five years are decided. I moved installation standards into the product organisation in 2023. Every installer partner now trains at one of our two academies, in Lucknow and Coimbatore, and every technician is certified for the work they do: anchoring structures on concrete and sheet roofs, earthing, DC cabling and commissioning. Each installation is photographed at eleven checkpoints in our app before commissioning, and our service team watches inverter data for the first ninety days to catch underperformance before a customer notices it. Partners receive a fixed share of their fee only after ninety days without a quality fault. The measure I report to the board is first-year service tickets per 100 systems: 38 for systems installed in 2022–23 and 11 for those installed in 2025–26. Our 520 service points are now judged on repeat visits avoided rather than tickets closed.

About 2.3 lakh Dhruvanta inverters now report their operating data to our app: when the grid fails, how deeply the battery discharges and how much power a household draws in the evening. That data improves our products and our service, and it also describes the private life of a home in some detail. I set our rules for it with that in mind. Customers agree to share data for named purposes, can see what we hold and can switch sharing off without losing any feature they paid for. Any new use, such as helping a lender assess a loan applicant, needs a separate and explicit consent rather than a clause in the original terms. India's data protection law of 2023 points in the same direction, but our rule came first from what we had told customers. I report data incidents and proposed new uses of data to the Risk Management Committee alongside product safety, because a household can be harmed by either.