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Archives
Piano Care
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Home Care
Your piano is a beautiful piece of furniture, and is also a wonderful modern machine for making musical entertainment. It needs and deserves intelligent care.
Your piano is a complex blending of many diverse and costly raw materials. There are more than 9,000 parts in the key and action combination alone. If you were to analyze the materials in your piano, you would find top quality wood of many species, iron, steel, copper, brass, plastics, wool, cotton, various adhesives, etc. Piano strings are known as the "Blue chip" of the steel industry. |
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They represent the highest development in steel wire and but few mills have the ability to manufacture them. Remember that there are more than 200 strings in a standard piano and that their combined tension exerts a pull of better than eighteen tons! |
These strings bear upon the sounding board by means of wooden bridges and a system of reverse bearings which practically lock the strings and board together. Each of these strings must be kept at the proper designed tension or it will be off pitch and produce an inharmonious tone.
In other words, it will be OUT OF TUNE!
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The Outside Finish
Modern Pianos are finished with different types of materials, from lacquer to modern polyurethanes and epoxy & polyester resins. Designed to enhance and protect the wood from dirt, liquid spills, physical abuse and the damaging effects of humidity changes, today's finishes don't need the additional aid of polishes or waxes. In most cases, a piano's finish can be maintained by simply keeping it clean and avoiding exposure to direct sunlight, extremes of temperature & humidity and abrasion.
To prevent scratches, never set objects on your piano without a soft cloth or felt pad, and never place plants or drinks on a piano, because spillage and condensation can cause major damage.
Your piano's cabinet, when subjected to excessive expansion and contraction due to humidity changes, can cause the finish to develop tiny cracks and even separate from the wood. Check the section on temperature and humidity for information on preserving the finish as well as the overall structure and tuning stability of your piano.
To avoid scratching, dust your piano lightly with a soft damp cotton or flannel cloth followed immediately with a dry cloth, and avoid creating swirl marks, always wiping with long straight strokes rather than circular motions. Wipe with the grain for natural wood finishes, or in the direction of the existing sheen pattern for solid-color satin finishes. If heavier cleaning is necessary, dampen your cloth with a small amount of mild soap solution.
Singfield Piano recommends against using common household products such as "lemon oil" or inexpensive "furniture polish" that claim to "protect" the finish or "feed" the wood (how can you feed the wood when it is sitting under multiple coats of synthetic material?). They offer no protection from scratching, cause a wax and oily buildup, actually soften some older oil based finishes if over-used and contaminate the finish with silicone; impeding restoration and touchup refinishing work. Worse, the over-spray from aerosol products, containing silicones, can contaminate piano strings, tuning pins and action parts.
Satin finishes are made up of very fine scratches (sheen pattern) going in the same direction. If a common household polish or wax is used on a satin finish, a spotty effect is created destroying the satin sheen. At this point the finish will have to be cleaned with a soft cloth and mild soap solution. If necessary a wax remover will have to be used for heavy wax buildup, followed by the application of a special durable wax used especially for satin finishes.
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Cleaning The Keys
Piano keys eventually become soiled with oil and dirt from fingers. To clean your white keys, avoid solvents and use a water dampened soft cloth with a small amount of mild soap if necessary. Make sure the cloth is wrung out, and wipe the keys back-to-front rather than side-to-side, so moisture and dirt will not work their way down the sides of the keys. Clean only a few keys at a time drying them right away with a clean cloth.
Ivory keys are porous, and too much moisture can penetrate and loosen their glue joints. Also, a dirty or brightly colored cleaning cloth can stain the ivory. Clean the sharps in the same manner, but use a different cloth for painted wooden sharps to avoid black stains on the white keys.
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Temperature and Humidity
Most problems pianos experience during their lifetimes, are due to temperature and humidity changes. These unseen, but definitely felt forces, are controllable in most cases. Being conscious of them is the first step.
Seasonal and even daily changes in humidity can cause piano parts to swell and shrink, creating tuning instability, poor touch and rust; affecting the regulation and friction of the action. |
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The ideal humidity level (relative humidity) for a piano is 42% year round. Given the temperature and humidity changes we all experience from season to season, it is an ideal very difficult and often impossible to achieve in our homes.
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In many areas of the world humidity levels are very low during the cold winter season, and very high during the spring and summer. In other areas these conditions are reversed. To check the levels in your home, you can purchase hygrometers from Singfield Piano, most hardware stores and electronics stores. |
Having a music room with a door and an independent heating source, helps control the temperature & Humidity for a piano regardless of the heating needs in the rest of your home. By keeping the door closed and the the temperature low in the room during dry periods, the air will retain more humidity.
To insure a relative humidity of 42% in the room during dry months, keep the door closed and a humidifier (one that sits on the floor) plugged in. Check the level of humidity with a hygrometer. If you find the level to be lower than 42%, turn the humidifier on, and set the humidistat control on the side of the humidifier's cabinet, to full. When the hygrometer indicates a relative humidity of 42%, turn the humidistat control on the humidifier down until you hear a small click (this will shut the humidifier off). Leave the control in this position, and the humidifier will come on automatically each time the level of humidity drops below 42%; restoring the ideal level of humidity.
For the humid months, replacing the humidifier with a dehumidifier (one that sits on the floor), and applying the same setup instructions as for the humidifier (except this time the level of humidity in the air will be reduced to 42%), will guarantee ideal conditions.
If you don't have a separate room for your piano, the best thing is to try and regulate the variance of temperature and humidity in the house to within no more than plus or minus 5 degrees and 5% respectively (try not to heat more than 70 degrees Fahrenheit, maintaining the level of humidity within the safety zone of 35% to 55%). |
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Whether you have a separate room for a piano or not, it's still a good idea to position your piano away from areas where it would be exposed to extreme temperature and humidity changes, such as cooling and heating vents, outside doors, stoves, and windows. Direct sunlight is to be avoided at all costs, and interior walls are better than exterior walls if your house is not well insulated.
The safety zone for pianos, between 35% and 55% humidity, is also the comfort zone for your health. "When your piano suffers so do you", says Maurice Singfield. "A medical doctor, who is a client of mine, told me that when the humidity in our homes drops to bellow 35%, we increase the risk of respiratory illness."
Another client of Singfield's is an engineer, who designs homes and office buildings, and he says it is impossible to maintain the proper humidity for pianos and our health during the heating season (when outside temperatures become extremely cold), and not damage the structure of the buildings we live in.
Because the dew point (the temperature at which moisture in the air condenses) is somewhere inside the exterior walls of our houses during the very cold months, wooden structures gradually become rotten if we maintain constant humidity levels of more than 35% in our homes. It is for this very reason windows "fog-up" during cold weather.
Over the years, construction associations have recommended the installation of ventilation systems, that lower the level of humidity in our homes during colder temperatures. The only thing is, these levels aren't satisfactory for maintaining good health and our pianos.
"My doctor/client feeds the output of his clothes dryer into his hot air furnace for extra humidity during the colder months, believing it is better to change the rotten wood in his house when the time comes, than to risk the health of his family", adds Singfield.
If you would rather go along with construction association recommendations, and you don't have the possibility of maintaining 42% humidity for the piano in a separate room, then the only thing you can do to fully protect your instrument is to install a Dampp-Chaser humidity system in the piano.