Damp Chaser
The piano life saver is a piano humidity control system…
About the piano life saver system
Your piano is primarily made of wood. Like the living trees that produced the wood
used in the building of your piano, wood responds to climate and environment - it breathes,
stretches and flexes. All wood instrument musicians are familiar with the effects of changing
humidity levels. Guitarists must frequently adjust their bridge heights and fingerboard action.
Violinists must pay close attention to maintaining constant, ideal humidity levels - or else they
may find their violin rather dramatically springing apart during a performance!
Just as with other wood-based instruments, your piano needs a constant level of ideal humidity -
between 40% and 50% - to maintain its pitch and tone, quality of action, and to prevent permanent
damage.
Benefit of consistent humidity
1. Maintaining pitch and tone
The soundboard is the single largest piece of wood in your piano. It is the speaker of the piano
In order for the piano to have proper tone, the strings, bridge, and soundboard must be in tension together. To make this occur, the piano is designed and built so that the strings have a slight downward angle on both sides of the bridge. This is called down bearing. Along with this, the soundboard must have a slight upward curve which is called crown. The down bearing and crown must be very precise. It takes very little change to dramatically compromise the tone.
When the humidity drops, the soundboard shrinks and flattens, lowering the tension of the
strings. The pitch will drop or become flat. The technician will have to perform a pitch raise to
bring the piano back to the proper pitch before a fine tuning can be done. When the humidity
rises, the soundboard absorbs moisture from the air, making it swell and increasing the crown. Now, the pitch will go up or become sharp.
This chart demonstrates how drastically pitch can change when your piano is exposed to fluctuations in the humidity during seasonal weather changes.
The Piano Life Saver constantly regulates the humidity level inside the piano so that
these variations can't occur. When the technician arrives for your regularly scheduled
tuning, he/she is quickly and easily able to perform a fine tuning and leave your piano
sounding its absolute best.
2. Maintain Quality of action
The complex mechanical linkage that starts with the key that you press with your fingers
and ends with the hammer striking the strings is called the action. It quite literally has
thousands of wooden parts that must all be precisely adjusted to work perfectly together.
This adjustment process is called regulation. When the humidity changes, the precision is
lost, resulting in the touch you have grown accustomed to changing and becoming inconsistent.
Primarily in a vertical piano, the Piano Life Saver System will help counteract these issues.
3. Prevent Sluggish or Sticking Keys
Just as doors and drawers become tight and difficult to move, the keys of your piano may
respond slowly or even stick down in times of high humidity.
4. Stop Rattling Keys and Noisy Action in Low Humidity
Just as doors and drawers become loose in dry air, the keys of your piano may rattle or
become mechanically noisy. When the wooden action parts shrink from dryness, they
become loose and can move around. This will lead to premature wear of these parts and
costly repairs in the future.
5. Prevent Costly, Permanent Bridge and Soundboard Damage
Over time, constant changes in humidity levels, with the corresponding shrinking and
swelling of the soundboard, will damage the integrity of the soundboard. You will see
this damage in the form of pressure ridges and cracks in the board. A crack in your sound
board has an extremely negative affect on the value of your piano. By maintaining a constant
level of humidity in your piano, the Piano Life Saver System virtually eliminates these damaging
humidity level swings and protects your instrument.
6. Prevent Pin block damage
Piano strings are under tremendous tension. The strings are coiled around tuning pins
that are driven into holes in a multilayered piece of wood, usually maple, called the pin
block. The tuning pin is actually slightly larger than the hole that it is driven into. The result
ing tight fit is necessary for the piano to be tuneable.
When the humidity increases, swelling the wood, the tuning pins may become so tight that the technician has trouble making the delicate adjustments that are necessary in a fine tuning
When the humidity level drops, the pinblock will shrink, resulting in loose tuning pins. This can result in a piano that will not hold tune very long or even render it completely untuneable. At this point you must either replace the pinblock or the piano.