How can do you extend the life of your tubes?

I use all tube equipment, amp and pre. I listen to music on the weekends. So i put on pre-amp on Friday leave it on till Sunday night. The amp stays on only when listening, then off she goes.

+1 Jmcgrogan, Yogiboy & Ryriken.

A comment: Light bulbs... IF you run a light bulb off a dimmer, and never run the light bulb at 100%, rather always at 50% or so..(and ramp it up slowly from zero to that 50% 70% etc. it will last nearly forever.
I would bet tubes which are very lightly stressed, like in some preamp designs will last for many many years.
(Some preamp designs which used 6dj8 s used to burn out tubes maddenly fast!!)

So how the tube cicuit is implemented matters a great deal for tube life.

I have read slightly under-biasing the output tubes will extend the life. Does it affect the sound? Yes in my opinion. That being said with most of my tubes I have to 'squint' to hear it. Another thing when the unit powers up you should let the tubes 'bias up' before playing music. I have found with under biasing the tubes it generally takes 2 to 3 min to bias up and when biased to spec it may take 5 - 7 min. Anyhow that's the routine I go through. My integrated is an Octave V70se which has standby and soft start. Soft start turns on the input and driver tubes first and about 20 sec later it turns on the output tubes.

thanks guys...I'm doing the same. Now how about this:
how do you know your tubes are beginning to fail and your music is suffering from tube deteriration? Do you bring you little babies to the tube Doctor to be tested? I would not know what to listen for. Also, when one of my driver tubes goes, time to replace all of them? I started a new thread on this to get some additional action. Thanks again.