Hi Terry, My opinion is equally firm and 100% opposite to yours. Household level equipment requires far too much of the owner to be useful. Proper Hivac installations are probably going to cost more than anyone other than the "ultra rich" are able to afford, and certainly more than the cost of many "home size" grand pianos. As I said, it is possible to maintain within 5% but not easy and not cheap. DC units properly installed (and serviced) are magnificent. >From a home use point of view a quilted cover may not to be useful as it need to be opened and/or removed when the instrument is used. String covers and bottom covers do stay in place 24/7. I had "state of the art" controls in two music studios in 1980. Each studio had independent heating, air conditioning, dehumidifier (drain hose in place), and humidifier (self filling, fed from a reverse osmosis unit). The humidity controllers were the most expensive part of the system and had human hair activators, which operated a relay so that the contacts did not have to deal with the relatively large "start up" surge from the dehumidifier. As this is a lifetime ago I'm sure controllers are more sophisticated and have narrower limits, but what I found was that I could not set the "swing" from dehumidifier cut in and humidifier cut out to a very narrow range, or both would operate at the same time--with the humidifier winning "hands down". It was not possible to use the studios with the dehumidifiers on nor with the air conditioning. Fortunately the climate where I did this has many more heating months than cooling ones, and more dry months than wet ones. In another post you mentioned how heat may transfer through the sound board panel. The same thing is true of humidity. That is why upright pianos with DC systems installed that have back covers (I recommend 5 mil poly installed by the client) are about 4 times more stable than those that don't have a cover. At 09:54 AM 2/18/2008 -0500, you wrote: > I have a very firm opinion that whole room/house/institution humidity >control is superior to a standard DC installation, or even a DC >installation with bottom and string covers. The better the instrument >is isolated from the room, the better the DC can perform (undercover, >string cover, and better yet, a nice quilted cover with long sides for the >entire piano - that is used whenever the piano is not being played). >is regulated, likely is humidity OUT OF CONTROL. A room with a Sears >dehumidifier with a tank that is not emptied or does not have a >functioning drain for water discharge or a room with some crude humidity >source and likely an even more crude regulatory device (if any such device >at all) is humidity OUT OF CONTROL. 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
This PTG archive page provided courtesy of Moy Piano Service, LLC