Sanyo’s Pedal Juice

A couple of weeks ago, I received Sanyo’s Pedal Juice rechargeable battery for powering pedals to try out. This is a interesting concept, which I can see some advantages, so I was eager to try it out. The Pedal Juice is a 9 volt power supply that is rechargeable, so you can power your various pedals. The advantages of this, is the savings on batteries (obviously) and this really caters the people that are having AC ground hum issues, or people that really dig ‘battery’ tone over the tone of the pedals supplied with other forms of pedal power.

The Pedal Juice has two outputs for power, but you can daisy chain the outputs to power more pedals, but your power time will diminish with each new pedal adding a power draw. If you power one pedal at 10mA (standard pedal -Tubescreamer, some Boss pedals, etc) you’re looking at 50 hours of battery life. 50 hours (in pedal life) is a long time. It takes approximately 3.5 hours to fully re-charge the battery. I believe each new pedal will split the total time down. So two pedals in the line will give you approximately 25 hours of continuous power, etc. (this is dependent on the mA consumption).

Your power options are contingent on your mA usage.

10mA = 50 hours
50mA = 27 hours
300mA = 17 hours
1000mA = 2 hours

To figure out your battery life, just add all the mA required in the line and that should give you a good approximation.

I would also like to clarify that this isn’t a product to completely replace your power supply, but would be a good solution for the following: only needing a few pedals for a performance and/or to address a specific issue with certain pedals causing noise, or that consume batteries at a high rate.

The Pedal Juice also comes with a reverse polarity adapter for pedals that require that. There is a three stage LED indicator for current battery life. Red is dead (or close to it), Yellow is in the warning, and of course.. Green is go-time. There is a single push button power button, and the entire enclosure is about the size of a single effect pedal, so it’ll fit nice and snug on your pedal board.

The Pedal Juice lists at $200, but can be found at Amazon for $149.99 (Free Shipping).  Depending on how many batteries you’ve gone through, this could be a fantastic deal.

I played this for a while, powering up my Ibanez TS9 Tubescreamer and it sounded great. The Pedal Juice is still fully charged after my test run, so no complaints there. I personally don’t have any AC ground issues with any my pedals, so couldn’t test if that correct it or not. The one draw back that I saw/read is that you cannot play while the battery pack is being charged. That would be nice in a pinch.