Mechanical Life of a Pedal Switch?

[Chrisk-K]

I'm just curious about this. Does anyone know the expected mechanical life of a good pedal switch?

[Taylor Livingston]

I haven't seen a datasheet for the common blue 3PDT, but the nicer Alpha ones have a life span of about 10,000 cycles. This is one reason to like relay-based true bypass: audio relays have a life of 500,000 cycles or more.

[Chrisk-K]

Thanks. Even if I turn on and off a pedal 50 times a day, the switch should last for at least 5 years.

[bongomania]

Yep, but remember those are averages--there are always outliers, switches that fail in a day, a week, a year... and switches that have not failed in 40 years of continuous use.

[ZH_Driver]

I was just reading about the Basswitch pedal (after reading another thread). If you Google Basswitch and read the flyer for the product, the maker notes that traditional switches fail either mechanically (physically breaking) or electrically (unwanted noise, bad connections) around 20,000 stomps. Always outliers, I this was not the case staticitians would be out of jobs.