my issues with IB

[Overnight]

Dude! I have *two*. But they don't last forever. One (lights, audio, printer) gives you ~5minutes. (It's an antique; mostly for clean power, not UPS purposes.) The other (desktop, ISP/gateway, monitors) goes maybe ~10-15minutes -- something which *might* get me out of sketchy positions, depending on my willingness to eat the vig... (said willingness set to increase geometrically as the Poisson-driven clock ticks on towards screeny-inky-black death....)

So, either I'm out of the house in 15 minutes, or I'm out of the trade. To outfit for more than that (equipment-as-insurance) is not supported by historic events (in terms of outages actually experienced over the past x-many years)... As the primary UPS ages (gets below 10 minutes?), I'll move it to ancillarys use, and get a new primary...

2 issues here.

A.) You really only need 10-15 minutes of total backup time to determine if you should hang on, or to shut-down your systems when the power outage does occur. My general rule of thumb is that when the outage comes, I wait for half the battery capacity to run down before deciding if it is going to be a long brownout, or a true blackout. If I sense no sign that the power will recover before the battery runs out at that half-way point, I use the remaining time to shut down the systems.

B.) You can just replace the battery in your aging UPS units, and get them back to like-new condition with the new-battery-swap. My first APC UPS lasted for, no lie, ~14 years with it's original battery (They really knew how to build them back then.) When the battery capacity dropped to like 2 minutes on the same load, I replaced the battery, and that one lasted for about 2 years and it started dying again. So I went to, by necessity due to the newer and more sensitive power supplies in PC towers that had evolved, pure-sine-wave UPSes by Cyberpower Systems. They are living large.

So half the penalty is taken away for you thinking through your scenarios. But you still are half-way in your penalty box. Get out of it completely by getting back-up-to-date on your UPS situation!!! NOTHING is worse than losing a hard-drive with a head-crash due to a power-loss shut down. It happened to me once, and I would not wish that on my own worst enemy. It is just HORRIBLE.

 

[mr_byte31]

regarding the depthTrader.

I tried to create two instants for two different stocks but it seems it doesn't allow me to have two at the same time.

is there any limitation ? I am just using a demo version

 

[tommcginnis]

2 issues here.

A.) You really only need 10-15 minutes of total backup time ...

B.) You can just replace the battery in your aging UPS units, and get them back to like-new condition with the new-battery-swap. ...

So half the penalty is taken away for you thinking through your scenarios. But you still are half-way in your penalty box. Get out of it completely by getting back-up-to-date on your UPS situation!!! NOTHING is worse than losing a hard-drive with a head-crash due to a power-loss shut down. It happened to me once, and I would not wish that on my own worst enemy. It is just HORRIBLE.

Sorry for the delay, but
1) Yeah, and agreed, and got the 15 minutes covered.
2) My UPS batteries are not replaceable, but if they were, I still wouldn't do it, because the other function of a UPS is in the surge/power quality area, and 99% of what's on the market is made of sacrificial components: so every moment that it's plugged in, it's aging, and doing less and less of what you bought it to do. And there's nothing to be done about it, except specific, timed, replacement. FWIW: my audio gear is hooked up with these:
https://www.brickwall.com/
These limit surges/drops via inductance, and have NO MOVs anywhere in the circuit. (It's the varistors that age...) They are not cheap, but when I owned an audio shop, I auditioned 4-5 different 'power' devices, and ALL OF THEM just sucked the life out of the sound -- I termed them Audio Vampires. It included some big names -- some of which I already had on board. To give you an idea, these $2500 power blocks would turn a $15k-$20 audio system into a $1k-$2k audio system. "Really!?!??!" It was grotesque.
So, I somehow find this tiny company near my Connecticut hometown, and they send me their thing, and I love the fact that it does not age/rock reliable... And there is NO bad effects on the system performance, and NO hiccups from local power. (Better now, but 1995-2005 was pretty bad... -- like *daily*.)
And so, bottom line? Brick Wall is a solid investment -- it's still in my audio system in 2018. (Whereas, to protect a $1k computer system with a $0.3k power block? Mehhhhh. Not yet, anyway.)