It started on
the kitchen table.

It started with the lights going out.

Astanah began as one person trying to keep the power on at home during load shedding. There was no budget for a battery, so the battery had to be built. David went around Lusaka, to the dump sites, the recyclers and the laptop shops in town, collecting old battery packs nobody wanted.

They came home to his mother's house. The kitchen table and the living room carpet were the first workshop.

Every cell tested, by hand.

A laptop pack fails because one or two of its six cells fail. The rest are usually fine. The first cell testers arrived, and every cell went through a full charge and discharge before it was trusted. The result was written on the cell in marker. It still is.

The first packs, with whatever was to hand.

Rudimentary soldering and welding. Twisted copper cable as busbars. The legs of resistors as fuses between the cells and the bar. Tested with a small inverter, a laptop charger and a shunt to read what was really happening.

Then a small solar panel, and a toolbox with three battery sets and a 12 volt inverter inside, a charge controller and sockets on the lid. That toolbox was the first portable power supply.

Learning on the fly.

Laptop cells in parallel for the first time, then in series, with a big copper busbar down each side and the laptop open to check whether the capacities and the sums were right. Testing at home, researching whatever could be found online, logging every result, and engineering a way to a solution one step at a time.

The first import, and the first power wall.

The first batch of batteries bought in from the United States: medical packs, laptop and phone batteries, and a few modules out of electric cars. All of it dismantled, tested and rebuilt. The spot welder was still a car battery with a switch on the terminal.

And the first power wall: batteries, inverter and supply in one steel enclosure, closed up with the cables out so the customer could connect it to his own panel. It went to a farm in Zimba, in Southern Province.

The team grows. Old supplies get new hearts.

Vuyo joined first. Then Gift, and later Edson. One of the very first to learn the work was the gardener at my mother's house, taught at the living room table to build packs and power supplies.

Portable supplies with dead lead batteries were opened, given 26650 lithium cells and a new management board, and charged on the lawn. A speaker with a dead battery got pouch cells. A Bosch drill got phone cells. Nothing that could be rebuilt was thrown away.

Testing systems the honest way: living on them.

Every system was tested at home before it went anywhere. Out on the lawn at night with a television, a laptop and a speaker running off it: if it could get us through an evening, it could get a customer through one.

The same months brought the first Mercedes-Benz modules, three of them arranged into one pack that is still working today, and the first prismatic pack, 24 volts, with busbars ground from pieces of copper by hand.

Power banks for homes, and Project Harvest.

Twelve-volt packs pulled from portable supplies, rebuilt with their own boards and wired into 12, 24 or 48 volt banks for homes and small businesses. Every bank was run on an inverter on the living room carpet before it left.

Supply needed to keep up, so we put the first pickers in Project Harvest T-shirts and paid them to collect packs from the dump sites and the town centre. Knowing batteries this well made the move into full solar installations a natural next step. The battery is the hard part, and we already knew the hard part.

A company, a name on the box, and a first investor.

Astanah Store Limited was incorporated in May 2023. The enclosures now carried our wordmark. On one table in April sat everything we had learned to build: 18650 and 26650 cells, prismatic cells, packs, supplies and a 12 volt power box. The earliest prototype packs were still there too, capacities written on every cell.

In October the Zambia Business Angels Network, who had heard the pitch two years earlier, invested US$25,000 in Astanah. That backing helped kick-start everything that followed.

Bigger jobs, harder batteries.

A customer sent a consignment of modules he believed were finished. Some were. Many were not, and boards, jumpers and patience brought them back. New 26650 cells came in from the American supplier. Residential solar became commercial and industrial solar, with the same cell-level care applied to bigger and bigger systems.

Astanah was also named best startup at the Mentorpitch programme. The investment offered with it was, for the moment, politely declined: five investors at once was more than a company that size was ready for.

Across Zambia.

Three buildings commissioned at Simalaha in Southern Province, off-grid, each system monitored remotely. Since then the team has installed from Western Province to Eastern Province and across Lusaka. Most of the photographs on this page were taken in a living room. These were taken in the field.

AI products, and still the batteries.

We now build AI products for Zambian businesses, for village banking groups and property management among them, and we run Astanah itself with an AI-enabled team. We install solar and storage, do electrical works, and monitor what we install.

And we still refurbish lithium batteries, on our own line in Lusaka, and help train the next technicians to do it. That is where we started, and we are not letting go of it.