Humidity Control

Your piano is made primarily of wood, a versatile and beautiful material ideal for piano construction.  However, being made of wood, your piano is greatly affected by humidity.  Seasonal and even daily changes in humidity cause wood parts to swell and shrink, affecting tuning stability and touch.  Extreme swings in humidity can eventually cause wood to crack and glue joints to fail.  

Other materials in you piano also are affected by changes in moisture content in the air.  The many felt and leather parts in you piano's action can change dimension, affecting regulation and friction, or stiffness of the touch.  Very high humidity can even create condensation on metal parts such as strings, tuning pins and hardware, eventually causing them to rust. 

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 inch 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 realative 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 created in the center of the soundboard more than at the edges, the pitch rises more in the middle octaves than in the bass or treble registers. During periods of low relative humidity the soundboard shrinks, reducing the crown and decreasing pressure agaisnt 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.  

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 failure.  The first and simplest precaution 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 you 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.  In most areas of the country the relative humidity is very low during the cold winter season and very high during the spring and summer.

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 relative humidity of the air within the piano and activates the system to add or remove moisture as needed.  These systems are designed to maintain the relative humidity 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.

While not eliminating the need for regular piano maintenance, humidity control will allow more stable tunings by reducing the radical pitch changes your piano may experience through the seasons.