How to get a Sunny Central to the 11th floor

SMA India recently placed a Sunny Central 630 CP in the Solar Academy. Now, that -per se- does not seem like a really big news. But consider this – the office is located on the 11th floor, the elevators are for persons only and the weight of the Sunny Central is 1800 kg. Crazy idea – one might say. Not quite. When I joined SMA last October, talks were already going on about bringing the CP in India. The German service team was co-ordinating with the Indian counterparts. The SMA Office was also designed after due considerations to get the Sunny Central in the office smoothly.

Too heavy for an elevator? No problem…

Let's make things lighter.

In the absence of Service elevator, the Sunny Central needed to be broken down into smaller pieces – something which – I am told – has never been attempted in the SMA history outside the manufacturing facility. Even after breaking down to the smallest possible compartment, we kept our fingers crossed. Due to the customs related issues, the dismantling could not be done in Germany. It was first brought to SMA India warehouse outside Mumbai. There, SMA Service Engineers Idrish and Sandeep along with our Project Manager – Piyush Kumar, did the first dismantling.

One Sunny Central, one team. Movement by bare hands.

Welcome to India

Re-packing the dismantled portions turned out to be another challenge and hence only the two cabinets were separated in the warehouse. The final dismantling could only be done in the parking area of our office. For this, we were allowed to work only on weekends and that too in a limited area. Since, we only had two days to move the inverter and since we were not confident about it fitting in the elevator, we had to be ready with manual labour to carry 1800 kgs on the 11th floor!! On Sunday, Vishal and Chandrakant removed many parts from inside the inverter to make it lighter including the doors with all its complicated wiring. Fortunately, all the three cabinets (including SOFTs) fit in the elevator. Most of the movement (from parking lot to elevator and from elevator to the final location) was done with bare hands. Only ropes were used in the process – welcome to India 🙂

 Finally in place with united forces

We did it. Smiles all across.

The excitement (and tension) was so high that our Managing Director Mr Khanna was present on both days. Everyone was greatly relieved to see the inverter finally in place! Our service engineers worked for another day before the inverter was finally in its (almost) actual condition.

We believe it, our new inverter will bring tremendous value to not only our trainings but will help SMA develop as a premium brand in India. Anyhow our colleagues are now experts for Sunny Central inverters and special missions.