Mafna Air Technologies has made a case for customised engineering of HVAC equipment as a course of action for retrofit projects, with the company’s CEO, Salman Akhtar noting that Mafna has seen strong demand in this regard. “We work very closely with the retrofit industry,” Akhtar said. “In fact, it’s a pretty custom all the way, because when you retrofit, 10 years down the road, your real estate is the same building with the same footprint in the same floor space. But now, you have more electrical loads and more stringent requirements by society, especially from the city, regarding sound and energy. [And] the capacity has to increase.” This, Akhtar said, is what the company often gets requests and calls for.

To further drive his point that retrofit-projects are not able to rely solely on existing products in the market, Akhtar provided an example of a request from a client for a 10 tonnes of refrigeration (TR) unit to be replaced with a 20 TR unit, but without being able to give any more additional space. “We come, take the measurements and accommodate within the geometry and configuration of the customers’ space,” he said. In some projects, Akhtar said, Mafna is not given proper floor space and that the company’s team finds space in the ceiling and includes the unconventional space in its design. “There’s a lot of creativity within what we do,” he pointed out.