Paul, I'm of the opinion that dehumidifier only systems are the best solution for most pianos in college situations. The simple reason is that things change from year to year, and the ability to maintain full systems changes with that. Even if you get paid student help or volunteer groups, you'll find yourself worrying every year that those resources will be able to continue. Otherwise, if it's you doing all the watering, tank and hum-bar cleaning and pad changing, you may as well just be tuning 50 pianos a week instead. There has to be some way you can get the point across about not unplugging the deh-only systems in rooms that aren't well monitored. Piano faculty, perhaps some other faculty such as voice, strings, woodwinds, piano major practice rooms, and classrooms used for such as piano pedagogy and seminars are about all I would consider installing full systems in. They are really the only groups that appreciate the stability enough to warrant the extra effort. And it IS extra effort. As far as expecting faculty to maintain the systems, that isn't in their job description any more than cleaning toilets is in yours. Yes, it would be nice for them to help out, but they have busy schedules and if they believe having to do someone else's job is keeping them from doing theirs, they're right. As far as paid student help goes, have your director/dean consider student workers provided through the financial aid programs such as work study. That money comes from somewhere else. If your director can't justify paying students to maintain the systems, ask him/her to consider that if you can't get student help at minimum wage, you're expecting faculty and staff (you) who make $50K plus a year to dedicate hours out of their workweek to the task, which means they're not doing their other jobs. Problem is keeping college students working for minimum wage when the work is no fun. There are all kinds of jobs college students can do that are more fun and often pay more money. As a student, I always dreaded filling tanks because the water source was so far from the pianos. For contract tuners, I recently came up with an idea to encourage installation of systems, when I was asked to submit a bid for a school i've been contracting with for about 3 years now. I added about $20 per piano for tunings for pianos without humidity control, and probably could push that higher. That's $100 or more per day, which will quickly pay for dehumidifier systems. It really doesn't make sense to have to cut your price by 1/3 or more to service pianos that require twice as much work because the climate where the piano sits is so unstable. We owe it to the value of our craft to price our work to reflect the level of effort required. Now that budgeting shortfalls for the music departments has gotten to this low point, I think we've set the stage for an evolution in the way we approach higher music education, and I think it will be for the better. Jeff Tanner ________________________________ From: Paul T Williams <pwilliams4 at unlnotes.unl.edu> To: Ed Sutton <ed440 at mindspring.com>; caut at ptg.org Sent: Tue, May 4, 2010 9:25:17 AM Subject: Re: [CAUT] Humidity control We have 2 or three fraternities. When I first started, one of them borrowed all my cleaning stuff and went around and cleaned all the practice room pianos! That was 4 years ago and I haven't seen them since! Good thought, though. Maybe with some faculty or director encouragement, they might do some more. All the DC's however are in piano faculty studios, so I'd have to let them in, and schedule timing between them and the faculty, etc......I'm better off just watering them myself since we only have 5 systems. I won't add anymore. P -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20100504/7a2a67aa/attachment.htm>
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