An engineer is working hard to warm up Kashmir homes by incorporating a customised central heating system. Rise in living standards is helping make the shift. Haroon Mirani reports.
The central heating system is slowly picking up in Kashmir, with quite a few new constructions incorporating it. People associated with the trade say that rise in living standards has helped people opt for the system over Hamams.
“Thanks to the awareness nowadays almost 30 per cent of new houses designed by architects are CHS compatible,” says Urfi Mustapha who is credited with bringing CHS to peoples’ homes in Kashmir.
An engineer, Urfi, set-up a company- Continental heating and Air-conditioning systems (CHAC) in 1998, which supplies and installs heating systems. “Our thrust area has been the individual households and it comprises the majority of our client base,” says Urfi, who hates working in government sector. “Even though the government sector provides contracts worth crores of rupees, but at the end of the day bureaucratic delays and other complications frustrates me.”
Urfi’s love affair with heating systems started during his stint at Fedders Lloyd where he was involved in designing and testing air conditioning system for rail bogies for Indian Railways. Though fascinated with the system, he developed interest in central heating systems on seeing a brochure depicting boilers. He thought of bringing this concept to Kashmir but he wanted first to “fully prepare himself” for the challenge.
In 1996, he went to England on a self-financed course to work as trainee engineer with Myson Potterton. “The six months I spent there were rewarding as I learnt the basics as well as the high end complexities of the technology,” says Urfi. “I had to learn everything so that if a problem arose I would be able to handle it. Here nobody could have helped me and I had to be perfect.”
A CHS involves laying of pipes in the walls that are connected to radiators in the rooms and to the heat generator set on the other end. The system can be powered by oil, gas, solid fuel or electricity.
However, Urfi had a tough time convincing prospective clientele to install CHS in their homes. So he went to leading architects in Kashmir with the concept and to explain to them the basics of CHS besides the need of its compatibility in house designing.
On an average, a house will get full-fledged central heating for two lakh rupees with a running cost of around 30,000 rupees for a winter season. “The running cost will be a lot lower if the house is energy-efficient,” says Urfi, who laments the fact that majority of the houses in Kashmir are not energy efficient particularly the modern ones.
“We know nothing about house building for a colder region. We, recklessly, use cement and CGI sheets. The latter is the mainstay of cowsheds and godowns world over.”
The company also deals with house insulation, making them energy efficient. Urfi also is loathe at the “unprofessional way” of doing plumbing in Kashmir. “Plumbing is a high-end art, where everything right from selection of pipe sizes to its alignment has to be done according to some norms, which unfortunately are not followed leading to freezing of pipes during winters,” says Urfi, whose company offers a solution to almost all problems associated with heating and cooling.
With their homes in Kashmir getting warmer and cosier, many people who would leave for warmer plains outside the valley during winters are reportedly staying back.
“A number of families in Kashmir used to visit New Delhi during winters,” said Urfi. “But nowadays they just stay put in Kashmir as it is more comfortable in Kashmir than in Delhi due to this CHS.”
The CHS market is currently valued at around Rs 8-10 crore clocking double-digit growth annually.
Urfi quit his government job as an engineer in UEED even when promoted as Assistant Executive Engineer, to set up a successful enterprise. “I just left the job as I didn’t like working there,” said Urfi.
And his antipathy for the way government offices work continues until now. His company has done just a single government project that involved the installation of CHS at the Circuit House in Srinagar. The company had bagged the contract after competing in all India level bid.
He could afford to stay away from government works as he gets a lot of orders from individual households but it took a lot of hard work until the trend picked up.
“When I started the CHS in Kashmir, it was a new concept among households and I had a hard time explaining its benefits to the people,” said Urfi. “Some believed me, most didn’t. Later I succeeded in winning customers and the trend started picking up.”
The major breakthrough in acceptability of CHS among potential customers came after Urfi was able to convince the owner of Mughal Darbar to install CHS in the popular restaurant after it was damaged in a fire incident.
“He (the owner) didn’t understand but he somehow got convinced and invested around 25000 rupees blindly,” remembers Urfi. The restaurant is the first in the state to get a clean and aesthetic central heating system. It also made convincing people easier as Urfi could take them to Mughal Darbar for a live demonstration.
After the success of CHS, Urfi’s company ventured into other associated products such as floor heating, steel fireplaces, hot water, air conditioning, house insulation and radiators.
The floor heating systems Urfi imports are also gaining popularity. “Till date, we have done 20,000 sq feet of floor heating and everybody is satisfied,” says Urfi. The floor heating is of two types, one is heated by electric coil and another by pipes through which hot water is passed. “Floor heating is the latest craze in Europe as it is more efficient and body-friendly way to heat,” says Urfi. Unlike CHS where hot air is pushed, which often sucks the moisture from the skin, the floor heating transfers heat right through the soles in an ambient way.
Floor heating is also one of the most energy-efficient. “I fitted the system for first three rows in Masjid Anjum Qamarwari and it just consumes 1.5 kW of energy,” says Urfi.
When Jaiprakash Industries had to lay floor heating for their Himachal plant, they could find only a single expert in this regard and it was Urfi.
Urfi believes in “100 per cent customer satisfaction” and that is why he says, the company has been relentlessly maintaining quality. He says the production, design techniques and materials used in the systems particularly sensitive boilers comply with both European and national standards.
Seeing the growing potential of this sector more players jumped into the fray to offer CHS. However, Urfi is the only Kashmiri member of American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) and Indian plumbing Association (IPA).
He has the dream of introducing Kangri to the world as according to Urfi. “There are a lot of poor people in the world and many of them die due to cold. I want Kangri to be introduced to them,” says Urfi. “Kangri is the best individual heating system and with it, one can work even in extremely cold temperatures.” The company brochure prominently displays Kangri alongside modern gadgets of heating.
Urfi claims that Kangri is a perfect heating system “Our elders were highly intelligent and they have perfected it (the Kangri) leaving no further scope of improvement.”
The businessman is also concerned about the environment. He helped a well-known company in Kashmir to modify its boilers to run on bio-fuel. “Earlier they used to guzzle five lakh litres of diesel per year. Think of how much carbon was saved from getting into the atmosphere,” says Urfi.
Urfi is constantly working on new ideas. He is currently associated with two projects with two different companies one from Delhi and one from China. The first project in association with New Delhi based Abid Consultants aims to build the world’s first Solar Air Conditioning system. “I got this idea during a visit to New Delhi where I saw steam coming out of solar water heating systems,” says Urfi. “Air Conditioning also works on Vapour Absorption system so I thought why we cannot use steam here and thus in collaboration with Abid Consultants we are designing the model.”
The system is currently in the testing phase and the company hopes to introduce it to the markets in the coming season. CHAC hopes to make it big with this groundbreaking technology that would environmental friendly.
Another project with the Chinese company is equally exciting through which he hopes to develop a system where energy is extracted from the air and used for water heating. “The work on this project is going on as India doesn’t have any expertise in it so I had to seek foreign collaboration,” says Urfi. “This is a new concept where 1.5 kW of energy will be turned into 4 kW.”
He is currently waiting for some machinery to arrive from China. “I have a dream of providing a system to Masjids for providing round the clock hot water for ablutions and it is the step towards that direction,” said Urfi.
Urfi is also one of the few engineers in the world who are working on developing a long-desired Kachelofen System. “In lay terms, Kachelofen is a vertical Hamam that is embedded in the wall and I am designed it provides heat to three rooms at a time,” said Urfi. “I am having some smoke issues but hope I will succeed.” He is in constant touch with another such inventor from Austria who is also working in the same field. Kachelofen has been developing in Europe for the last two thousand years and many variants are currently available in the international market. Urfi’s system aims to be the most efficient in its league and one of the cheapest.
