Dehumidifier for Piano Review: Why Control High Humidity?

Pianos placed in rooms with relative humidity above 50% can experience damage to both wooden and electronic parts that should be prevented if at all possible.

Though most damage due to high humidity is no cause for concern, it will have an impact on the appraisal value of the instrument and may warrant replacing electronic components overtime.

It's important to consider to monitor closely the humidity in the room where the piano belongs and implement dehumidifiers/humidifiers as needed. Prevention is fundamental when it comes to preserving the health of the piano.

Piano Dehumidifier

There are many different dehumidifier brands, models, and features that may or may not be effective for your pianos' needs.

Get the best value out of the dehumidifier you select by following a few of the criteria listed below.

Dehumidifier for Piano (Must haves)

• Large tank (2 Gallons)

• Drainage features (hose to drain)

• High capacity/square footage (4,000ft+ or 50pints/day)

• Minimal noisiness level (Important for music rooms)

The must-haves are the bare minimum features needed from a dehumidifier in order to be effective at protecting your piano from dangerous humidity.

Dehumidifier for Piano Important Features (Nice-To-Haves)

• Smart features

• Wi-Fi connectivity

• Humidity record graphs

• Energy efficiency

The nice-to-haves are helpful and convenient, but are not essential in protecting your piano against high humidity.

After about 30-40 minutes, the Dehumidifier was able to reduce the relative humidity by about 15%, sufficient to lower the humidity for most rooms in any house.

In general, dehumidifiers are effective, however, they need to constantly run in order to maintain the preferred relative humidity.

From my experience owning both humidifiers and dehumidifiers for piano, it's much easier to humidify a home than to dehumidify a home. If you need to humidify your home, here's my humidifier recommendation.

Owning the GoveeLife dehumidifier for my piano room is convenient because I can monitor the humidity from afar, using my mobile device.

GoveeLife Dehumidifier

The GoveeLife Dehumidifier I own meets all of my requirements to keep a piano safe from dangerous levels of high humidity.

This dehumidifier includes additional smart features that are unique to appliances created in the 21st century.

How Does High Humidity Negatively Affect Acoustic Pianos?

If a piano is in a space where the humidity is too high, there will be a few different things that will be affected when given enough time.

Here, I elaborate on some of the damages that can be incurred from high humidity below.

• Pressure Ridges on the soundboard

• Piano Tuning instability

• Pianos will drift sharp

• Slightly more difficult to tune

Pressure Ridges: These are raised grain lines along the soundboard that make the surface of the soundboard feel like there is a "bump" when you run your fingers across the soundboard. The bump that goes along the grainlines is inconsequential to the sound, though it does mean that the wood fibers have forever been damaged.

Piano Tuning Instability: A piano room that has humidity above 50% is simply a room that is not humidity controlled. Many piano owners will believe that the AC plays a role to reduce high levels of humidity. To control the humidity at a professional level, using the air conditioner is simply unacceptable.

Piano Tuner Observations: While tuning the piano, tuners can feel that the tuning pins feel/respond differently to force due to high levels of humidity. This makes it more difficult to set the pins with consistent stability across the pin block of the piano.

Dehumidifier for Piano

How Does High Humidity Negatively Affect Electronic Pianos and Pianos with Electronics?

• May effect internal circuit boards

• May need to replace circuitboards

• Storage facilities must remain dehumidified

Humidity and electronic components do not mix. The same goes for keyboards and pianos with electronic components.

Replacing circuitboards: Extra humidity due to a variety of environmental factors may be culpable to some extent to the failure of circuit boards. Therefore, replacing select circuit boards may be necessary at times.

Piano owners should take good measure to prevent high levels of humidity in the piano room.

A fantastic way to prevent damage is by operating a dehumidifier in the same room as the piano.

Gel Silica Bead Packs

These packs are only effective for initial/short-term high humidity shocks, and are not protective against sustained high levels of humidity.

Perfect Dehumidifier for Piano

Whether the dehumidifier is chosen from this blog post or elsewhere, please take note of the bare minimum requirements necessary to protect against high humidity levels.

The Dehumidifier (above) is ON, it's functioning with the lights OFF which can be useful when running the dehumidifier at night.

GoveeLife Dehumidifier

The dehumidifier above meets all of the requirements necessary to sufficiently protect against the negative impacts of high humidity to a piano.

Both acoustic and electronic pianos should be protected from high levels of humidity in addition to relative humidity levels that are too low.

Piano Dehumidifier Capacity

The bucket capacity for this dehumidifier contains 2 gallons of water for each time the bucket gets emptied.

The GoveeLife Dehumidifier for piano also includes a hose that can be emptied into a drain for unlimited dehumidifying purposes. This will eliminate any need to empty a bucket or maintain the dehumidifer at all.

With the hose provided, you can "set it and forget it!"

GoveeLife Dehumidifier on Amazon

Humidity Control Information for Piano

Best Humidifier for Piano Room: Low Maintenance/Heavy Duty

Best Humidifiers for Musical Instruments on Amazon [Top 3]

Accurate Hygrometer to Monitor Relative Humidity/Temp for Pianos

Piano Dehumidifier: Why Control High Humidity?

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Piano Dampp-Chaser Humidity System: Pros and Cons

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