Can we talk about how rarely we actually check belt tension?

I was reading a service bulletin from a while back and it said something like 70 percent of serpentine belt failures are from wrong tension, not the belt itself. That number surprised me. I used to just slap a new belt on and send it, figured the auto-tensioner did all the thinking. But after a few comebacks on the same engine types, I started actually measuring with a gauge instead of eyeballing it. Found two trucks last month at my shop in Tacoma that were way loose, the tensioner looked fine but the belt was flapping around more than it should. The gauge cost me about $40 and it paid for itself in one stop. Am I the only one who skipped this step for way too long?

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