Hi Dean, Ring of truth? Perhaps. Perhaps not. I have had at least one client with strings that were adversely affected--but that is because they were too impatient to use the filling tube and were splashing water on the strings when they manually filled the humidifier tank. It was a Baldwin 6000. Needless to say I'm not too popular with that client. I have had clients where the old aluminum support bracket on the humidifier bar "burned through" do to corrosion. I've never thought to ask them if they were using soft water or not. I do live in an area of extreme hard water. Evaporation does concentrate any "salts" in the water bucket. It is good practice to empty it once per year and "start fresh". I believe Roger Jolly did an article which seemed to indicate that pads start to loose efficiency in about two months. I find that every three months for pad changes works well. This is totally dependent on the water quality in your area. My findings are that folks who use soft water get far more "build up" around the humidifier bar, than if they use non softened drinking water. If your water is softer than mine to start with--this would be less of a problem. I recommend ordinary drinking water, reverse osmosis water and distilled water. The latter two do require the first fill to be ordinary drinking water to allow the water to be conductive. I advise my clients to *not* use soft water, not because of risk to the strings but because it clogs the pads sooner. At 05:14 AM 8/28/2008 -0400, you wrote: >Don wrote: Water Softners replace calcium ions with sodium ions. The result >is a bucket of very salty water by the end of a year. Salty water is not so >good for piano wire, so I'm told by the folks who live on our coasts. > > >This seems to be in the category of wives tale. It has a ring of truth to >it, but has been dispelled by Roger Wheeler himself in the post below when >you've made similar claims 3 years ago. I also have many years of anecdotal >evidence in scores of systems to demonstrate that using soft water does not >contribute to string corrosion. YMMV > >Dean Regards, Don Rose, B.Mus., A.M.U.S., A.MUS., R.P.T. Non calor sed umor est qui nobis incommodat mailto:pianotuna at yahoo.com http://us.geocities.com/drpt1948/ 3004 Grant Rd. REGINA, SK, S4S 5G7 306-539-0716 or 1-888-29t-uner
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