At 11:28 AM 3/9/98 -0600, Don wrote: >Hi Greg and Mary et al, > >One very useful comment was made about 2 years ago on the listserv. >Cigarette smoke travels in a room at 44 feet per second. I see *no* reason >why water vapour should *not* do likewise. Hi, Don! At the risk of sounding pretentious, this seems a _very good_ time to point out that just because something shows up on a list, it doesn't mean you should chuck your common sense into the closet and lock it away. Picture: You are in a large room, such as a concert hall, 44 feet long. Someone lights a cigarette on stage (heaven forbid) and you are sitting in the back row. _One second_ later you smell it ... he hasn't even blown the match out yet, you can see the initial puff of smoke as he exhales, about 1.5 feet across (if you have binoculars), yet you can smell it? (and I know a bridge you may be interested in buying.) _Picture_ the smoke curling off a cigarette ... it goes mostly upwards, in slow and lazy curls, visibly still in strands, not instantly dispersed to every corner of the room. Of course, this doesn't mean that the humidifying aspect of a Dampp-Chaser doesn't spread water vapor through the house. The part that I tested was the dehumidifier. I have no experience with the tanks of water. Purely as a thought experiment, I could picture the water vapor, quite warm, coming off the pad, and travelling upwards to the soundboard, displacing cooler drier air, which would escape from around the bottom of the sides (by convection). The board would absorb some water (some vapor would condense since the board was cooler), a little would go through the holes for nosebolts, (and possibly try to rust the strings!?) most would nestle there under the board until it cooled, then it would fall and disperse through the room. The question that we seemed to be talking about was whether the Dampp-Chaser system in a grand would affect the action, lurking behind the belly rail and above the keybed. I believe that if we were talking about the heat of the dehumidifiers, in the soundboard area, it probably would hardly affect the action at all. Wood is a pretty good insulator. If we were talking about water vapor, I think it would concentrate under the board, and then cool and disperse fairly evenly through the room, which we assume would breathe at least a little. (Even a tightly weatherized house breathes once or twice an hour, doesn't it? Or does it? In the mild Northwest our houses are probably a lot more leaky.) My feeling is that by the time the water was evenly spread in the room, it would be at a small enough concentration not to affect the action _much_ ... maybe a little. I see no reason it would affect the action more than it would affect everything else in the room. It has a fairly long path to follow to get into the action cavity. Open to correction ... (if you don't ask you don't learn.) Susan Susan Kline P.O. Box 1651 Philomath, OR 97370 skline@proaxis.com "I don't want to go hunting for knowledge: I want it to come and grab me." -- Ashleigh Brilliant
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