Advice on room heating.....I have a Natural Gas heater.
Hi all Not sure if this has been covered in these forums before but a quick search didn't find anything. Anyhow here in Oz we are now into our winter , i have a natural gas heater that is located in the same room as both my players.The room is large with a tiled floor.Before i had the players the heater would heat the room quickly , but the air was very dry.Since i had the players ive never used the heater again for fear of damage to them (last year was a mild winter and went with out using it even once).Well this year it is alot cooler then last year and I'm really keen just to take the chill off the air (not cook the room). Before i start using it , are there any tips or advice that may help me out? , is wrapping the players with a blanket going to help them? Many thanks for any help.....Daniel

Advice on room heating
Hi Dan, much more important than temperature, is humidity level. All buildings leak some air out and back in to replace it. The outside air, when heated, drops it's relative humidity level. I recently bought a Venta-air humidifier -- air purifier unit and it seems ideal for a piano room. They are made in Germany, and I think there is a similar Swiss unit. Just type in Venta-Air for more information. Hal Klassen

Re: Advice on room heating
yeah, humidity is the thing. I doubt it gets so seriously cold in Oz that players have a problem ever. Players date from a time when house weren't centrally heated etc. I can think of several examples where pianos went into a workshop for repair and, after sitting in unheated cool but dry conditions came back to 100% due to the increase in humidity absent in modern homes. Too much humidity can swell felts and cause rust and hammer shanks to twist in the most extreme cases (thinking of one example I saw in tropical Thailand once!) but, as Hal says, humidity is the main thing. In the UK and most of Europe we don't have issues with this but certainly in the US there are places that are very very dry and other that are extremely humid.

Advice on room heating
Hi Adam, the UK is, as you say, much different. Before modern construction method and central heating, one of the most common problems was "the Rising damp" I have bought players in the UK that were so rusty, you'd think they were stored in a swamp. Many older pianos were imported to NA by the container load A lot of these were "bird cages" and after placing in a relatively dry home, they cracked,the pins loosened and their only value was for the candle holders. Some of these pianos had lovely wood work and some had an electronic keyboard installed The best thing is to spring for an accurate hygometer, and keep the humidity between 40--50 %, year round. Hal Klassen

Thanks Hal and Adam , i will look into getting a hygometer ,seen as i have 2 pianos in the same room, with more to follow im sure...lol. Daniel.

To pick up the "wrap in blankets" part of the query, that's not going to help because the piano will reach the same temperature wrapped or unwrapped, not having any internal source of heat! Something to consider is the radiant heat, though. If the heater is particularly close to the piano it might cause localised heating which will do the instrument no good. If that happens to be the case, some insulation between heater and piano will help reduce this direct heat gain. As for humidity, the figure normally quoted to aim at as a minimum for older instruments is 40% RH. This is generally what they were constructed for, and if dried further the wood will shrink. Manufacturing practices changed over time. Up to late Victorian times British pianos were designed to have soundboads in tension as it was thought to help the sound. These crack along the joints (and apparently did so even in the factory), leaving a collection of loose planks laid over the ribs! Later soundboards tend towards compression, achieved by heating and thus shrinking them during installation. Samuel Wolfenden, Aeolian's chief designer in the UK up to 1915, strongly recommended the practice in his book on piano design. Hence cracked soundboards, although talked about in older piano-repair books, are nothing like as common in instruments of the player era. Modern pianos use kiln-dried wood and survive much lower humidities. As for rising damp... it's little more than folk myth and a damp-proofing salesman's pitch! The Building Research Council did a lot of research to see how far up a stack of bricks water will rise, and found that even for the most porous bricks it was only an inch or two, less if mortar rather than cement is used. The normal cause of damp houses is water pentrating the walls from outside, particularly on single-skin buildings, or condensation due to poor ventilation. As Adam said, a lot of British houses simply were not heated except in the room being used - and then not heated much or for long - so if prone to damp there would be nothing to dry it off. Many pianos would sit in the 'Parlour', rigidly reserved for use only when guests visited and left to gather mildew the rest of the time! Julian

Advice on room heating
The problem is not the type of heat , but the "relative" humidity of the air in the room. If outside air at 40 F is at 100% relative humidity and it enters a building and is heated to 70 F, it's relative humidity has dropped to less than 50% This drying takes place constantly as more air leaks out and mre comes in to replace it. We used to do heat loss calculations on typical older homes and a rule of thumb was, if you could add up all the cracks you would end up with a hole big enough to walk through. Another thing to keep in mind is, don't have the piano on an outside wall. Hal Klassen

Thanks Hal , both my pianos are located on internal walls.My house is only 3 years old and pretty well insulated (all new homes in Oz now have to have a green energy rating) . I brought myself a hygrometer today and before i turned on the heater it was reading 68% , after i turned the heater on it only went down to 63% and stayed that way.Just to be on the safe side i still left a bucket of water with a damp towel in to help just in case. Daniel

You should be fine, Dan, it's nice to know the level and anything over 50% is safe. Hal