This is the kind of weather where plugging in your vehicle is an absolute must. And an idea born in Saskatoon to address a common winter problem is among the products, which have created what the company’s CEO says was a “mind-bending response”, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last month.
Trevor Burgess says the VoltSafe Winter has matured since it first came to market and is no longer based on magnetic actuation which is like a proximity-based trigger to turn on power when the two sides come together. Burgess says there are two main reasons behind the creation of VoltSafe Winter, one of which includes safety. Burgess says it is a magnetic break-away and is much safer than a pronged plug. He says they passed a level of safety that is near aerospace level.
And then he says there is the other obvious reason.
“We definitely wanted to make people not have to endure the personal embarrassment of not having to do the drive of shame and having that, you know, snow snake following you all the way to work or sometimes falling off and being left to the wild in a snowdrift.”
They also want to save on energy because Burgess says it doesn’t make sense to have a vehicle plugged in all night which is something you can do by setting a timer on the App.
As they have continued to refine the product, they have made changes. Burgess says initially all the smarts on the VoltSafe Winter were in the head of the plug, but they have actually moved it upstream in the cord because otherwise, every time it separated abruptly from your vehicle, it was essentially the same as dropping a computer.
William Topping and Aresh Janfada at the University of Saskatchewan were founders of the concept and eventual product.
The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January featured more than 3,200 exhibitors and more than 115,000 people attended. Burgess says they had five of their products at the show and it generated interest from companies like General Electric which was looking at their home plug and talking about licensing it. He says their patents reside worldwide and their goal is to drive adoption of the products with partnerships through licensing.
VoltSafe Inc. was named a CES® 2023 Innovation Awards Honoree for two of its products: VoltSafe Home, Powered by the Ideal Switch® (by Menlo Micro) and VoltSafe Marine.
