The Qube is a low cost and highly affordable intelligent device that alerts you to electric power outages when they happen at your home, vacation house, and or business.
The inspiration behind the Qube is to build a simple, low-cost, and easy-to-use 24x7 power status platform that, like Weather.com, can provide instant real time information to citizens and decision-makers. Power outages are a part of life. Indeed, even in areas where power is generally reliable, weather and natural disasters can cause unanticipated outages. In such situations, little information is immediately available about the outage, the extent of it, and when power has been restored. This was very visible during the recent Superstorms Sandy and Nemo that hit the east coast, as well as the massive blackout in July 2012 in India that left over 600 million people without electricity, or approximately twice the entire population of the US.
The Qube is a small and important component of efforts to bringing utility-related communication into the 21st century. The Qube works in tandem with a map based web platform that combines data from multiple sources as well as other shared Qubes, to provide a cohesive picture of emerging outage issues over large or small areas. The Qube and the platform geo-code all data, and it is available inside mobile phones and on map based interfaces. The Qube can also log other useful and important information like temperature to help you make better decisions, as well as help you to check and evaluate historical reliability for power in different locations.
With the Qube and its associated platform, time lapse development of outages related to weather and other events can be reviewed on a historical basis or at a period of time. In countries with poor infrastructure, the Qubes can be very effective in understanding the outage patterns at a granular level and planning effectively for them. Data collected from the Qubes will be available for governments, agencies and utilities across the world to help them plan for more reliable power.
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