The slide switch broke after about six months of normal use. For my kitchen, "normal" use for this item means once or twice during the week and several times over each weekend. I find this particularly odd because I simply left the slide switch in one position, so it certainly did not wear out from overuse. When the timer stopped working, I thought the battery had died, but it turned out that the if I moved the switch to a different position I could (barely and erratically) get the timer to work, but not in the multi-timer mode.