till eight months ago at the five lakh sqft pacific mall near west delhis subhash nagar metro station a team of technicians had to walk around switching on and off 300plus airconditioners every day and the monthly power bill was staggeringnow a team of technicians sitting in chennai does this job and the monthly power bill too has been reduced by 3035 its the work of zedbee technologies a deep tech iitmadras incubated companyby monitoring the systems on the cloud and connecting them to the internet one can do the samejob irrespective of where the technicians are sitting says ankit poddar founder ceo zedbee technologies pvt ltdhis interest in engineering brought poddar from kolkata to iit madras and prof ashok jhunjhunwala one day in 2013 jhunjhunwala gave him a problem to solve a building phase i of iit madras research park that had just been commissioned was consuming too much energy and people in it either felt too cold or too hot and even after spending several crores of rupees professors were unable to solve the problemfind a solution and it could be turned into a business jhunjhunwala told himwe undertook deep research for about two and half years on how to make a commercial building function more efficiently we came up with a solution that reduces power consumption by 3540 and offers thermal comfort too under centralized ac we are offering a decentralized system where occupants will never feel too cold or too hot a problem with most commercial buildings says poddar the entire research park now uses the system and has become zedbeesanchor client not just airconditioners the system connects and monitors even air quality controls diesel generator sets and ups systems when we set out to undertake research we also had one thing clear whatever the solution it has to be affordable only then can one take it to the masses says poddaraccording to him there are about 50000 large commercial buildingsacross india but hardly 1500 of them are fully automated in most cases automation systems would have been installed but may not be functional for indian climatic conditions most automation solutions are developed in the us and other developed countries and simply installed here on the recommendations of consultants automation is key but at what cost is the questionsensors to monitor temperature in some buildings cost 1000012000 while a simple thermometer to measure body temperature costs just 8090 we started using lowcost sensors that cost 100150 to monitor temperatures in buildings wire connectivity added 40 to costs we replaced it with simbased and wireless connectivity air sensors to monitor air quality had cost 4000050000 per unit we build low quality air sensors as a result the cost ofautomation came down drastically while the system became more effective says poddareven in the case of pacific mall the builder agreed to pay us if the system worked we invested in the system and it is working thereby bringing us a recurring income under a saas model