Hi Henry, In a home situation, a room humidifier may be a more viable option than in a school building because the ventilation system brings in hot or cool air, but does not evacuate the air in the room. At my school, there are two vents in every room, one to bring air in and another to take it out to the next room (and on down the line). The room in which our double bass students store their instruments has a room humidifier in it which has what would be more than ample capacity, if not for the fact that the air is circulated throughout the building as I just explained (with outside air always being introduced to the system). So, even though that bass storage room is fairly small, the humidifier cannot begin to keep up with the demands of raising the humidity level throughout the building. YMMV. Alan Eder CalArts -----Original Message----- From: Dr. Henry Nicolaides <drsnic4 at hotmail.com> To: College and University Technicians <caut at ptg.org> Sent: Mon, 10 Nov 2008 11:55 am Subject: [CAUT] damp chaser vs room humidifers Hi list, Since the subject is being discussed...is there a preference? I have small grands in practice rooms, two piano studios (larger rooms), and several pianos in choral and orchestra rooms. Given the large size of the choral and orchestra rooms, systems in the pianos are the only viable option. However, in the smaller studio and practice room does a humidifer make sense. Given the cost difference and my bbudget or lack thereof, I might get a "good" humidifer for 69-79 dollars easier than the dampp chaser system. Granted in the Spring the dehumidifer rod would be needed. And, for the studios where there are two pianos the cost differential makes more sense. It is now only the beginning of the heating season and the RH today in the studio rooms borders 30%. The pianos have not had the advantage of humidification over the years. We have three Baldwin R's that were purchased in 1996. All have little to no bearing with visible splits at the bridge pins. Two have one or two cracks in the soundboard. I have a client that had no bearing in her older Baldwin M. Her complaint was the two octaves above the middle c octave were "dead". Two months of room humidification set at RH of 50% restored enough bearing to liven those octaves to her satisfaction. Any comments? FYI, I am the new piano technician at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. I look forward to meeting you one the web and perhaps next Summer at convention. email: henryn at siu.edu Henry Nicolaides School of Music Southern Illinois University Carbondale, IL 62901 Get 5 GB of storage with Windows Live Hotmail. Sign up today. = -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut_ptg.org/attachments/20081112/0aa3dd06/attachment-0001.html>
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