What can be done to minimize humidity problems in piano?

Keeping the humidity level around your piano as constant as possible will help it stay in tune longer as well as slow such damage as soundboard cracks, loose tuning pins, and glue joint failures. The first and simplest action you can take is to position your piano away from areas where it would be exposed to extremes of temperature and humidity such as heating and cooling vents, stoves, doors, and windows. Direct sunlight is especially damaging. If your home is not well insulated, an interior wall is preferable to an outside wall. 

Controlling the humidity within the home is another step you can take to preserve your instrument. Use of a room humidifier during dry seasons will help somewhat. However, too much moisture added to a room during winter months can cause condensation to form on cold surfaces such as windows, eventually causing mildew, rot, and in extreme cases, damage to the building structure. During the humid season, de-humidification is needed. If your humid season is winter, keeping the home evenly heated will help. However, humid summer situations require much more elaborate de-humidification systems. Unfortunately, it is seldom possible to adequately control the relative humidity of a piano by controlling the room environment alone.

A very practical and effective answer to humidity problems is to have a humidity control system installed in the piano itself. These systems consist of three parts: a humidifier for adding moisture to the air, a dehumidifier for eliminating excess moisture, and a humidistat or control unit which senses the RH of the air within the piano and activates the system to add or remove moisture as needed. These systems are designed to maintain the RH of the air within the piano at the ideal level of 42%. The components are installed out of sight, inside the case of a vertical piano or under the soundboard of a grand. They are easy to maintain and can be installed by your piano technician.

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Piano Tuning And Repair Service

 

• Tuning $175 - A standard tuning is for those pianos that have been tuned in the past 6 months to a year. It involves manipulating the tuning pins to bring all 230 strings to their proper and harmonious pitch. We use a combination of aural and electronic tuning to ensure your piano sounds great! We also tighten the plate bolts, check for problems, and tighten the bench.
• Pitch Adjustment $95 - If we haven’t seen your piano in a while, it may need one or more Pitch Adjustments to bring the strings up to a tension where fine tuning is possible without stressing the piano.
• Repairs (Prices Vary) - Do you have a stuck key or broken string(s)? We can help! Our technicians are well trained in all manner of repairs, from a simple stuck key to major action work.

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Basics of Piano Care | Grand Piano Repair

 FIRST POST! Thanks for checking out this blog page. We will be adding content every week or so, as long as we keep coming up with interesting and informative things to say.

I’d like to start by talking about basic piano care… The aspect of piano care that everyone is familiar with is tuning. Pianos go out of tune due to changes in humidity, which swells and shrinks the wood of the soundboard, bridges, and action parts. This happens regardless of how much or how little the piano is played. We STRONGLY recommend having your piano tuned twice a year. This is in line with all manufacturer’s recommendations. If you put it in terms of car maintenance (the other big, complicated machine in your life), tunings are the oil changes of piano care. It’s important to note that your piano may be out of tune and still sound relatively ok, but not be at the correct pitch. More on this in a future post. Is your piano out of tune? Find out how to determine this here.

A piano is a very complex instrument, with up to 10,000 parts - many of which move and are subject to wear over time. This causes the piano to function at a sub-optimal level, lessening your enjoyment and making playing and learning more difficult. The good news is this is a relatively easy condition to combat. Every 3 years or so, the action should be serviced. To do this, we remove the action, clean it with compressed air, lubricate all action centers, and tighten all screws (over 200 in uprights!). This serves three purposes: it makes the piano play better, avoids problems due to contaminant buildup, and allows for the detection of small issues before they become big ones. If it were a car, this would be the inspection and basic tune up.

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How does the humidity level affect my piano's tuning?

 The swelling and shrinking of the piano's soundboard is the most immediate and noticeable effect of humidity change. The soundboard, a sheet of wood approximately 3/8” thick, is made with a slightly crowned shape. The strings pass over the soundboard and are connected to it by a wooden piece called a bridge. The upward crown of the soundboard presses the bridge tightly against the strings.

As the moisture level in the soundboard increases during periods of high relative humidity, the crown expands and pushes the bridge harder against the strings. The strings are stretched tighter and the piano's pitch rises. Because this increase in crown is greater in the center of the soundboard than at the edges, the pitch rises more in the middle octaves than in the bass or treble registers. 

Relative humidity (RH) is the amount of moisture contained in the air, compared to the maximum amount of moisture that the air is capable of holding. During periods of low relative humidity the soundboard shrinks, reducing the crown and decreasing pressure against the strings. The pitch drops, again with the greatest effect noticeable in the center of the keyboard. When relative humidity returns to its previous level, the average pitch of all the strings will return to normal, although the exact pitch of individual strings will be slightly changed from their original settings. Thus, a piano only will stay in tune as long as the relative humidity level in the air surrounding the soundboard remains constant. Extreme humidity changes require making greater changes in string tension to bring the piano into tune. This upsets the equilibrium between the string tension and the piano frame, and the piano never becomes stable.

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