Piano Video Lesson: Can Water Damage Your Piano?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, asking the question today, can water damage your piano? I'm Robert Estrin and this is a great question. When should you be concerned about water? When is it not a problem? Is it ever not a problem? Many of you may have seen in the recent Celine Dion performance at the Olympics, a piano, a grand piano getting just completely covered with rain.

And many of you may have cringed thinking what is happening to this piano? There are some really extreme examples of people trying to see just how much water a piano can possibly take. I'll have descriptions of these in the video with links, so check it out.

But today we're going to cover what type of damage can be done with water and what things are maybe not so concerning.

Well, for many of you might already realize it, even humidity can bother a piano.

Water in the air can be absorbed by all the felt parts, making things sluggish. It can make the tone kind of dead and lifeless. The hammers get kind of absorbed with moisture.

So moisture in general, excessive moisture is damaging to a piano. Over time, the strings can rust, strings can start breaking. So moisture is a problem for pianos. Pianos thrive on moderate temperature and humidity. 45 to 50 % range is ideal for a piano. Too dry is another whole subject for another video. But let's talk about specifically what you saw in, if you watch the Celine Dion performance and watch that piano, and you think, oh my gosh, that piano is destroyed, or is it? My feeling about it is this.

The only water that really concerns me with that image is anything that would get in the crack where the hinge is, where the fly lid folds over. Water that gets in there could extensively go on the soundboard. Any water on your soundboard is trouble. For example, if you have water and you put a glass of water here, which you should never do ever, if it happens to fall inside your piano, you must get an emergency technician out right away because that can destroy your soundboard.

In order to get to it, you have to pull the action. If you don't know how to do that, I would not advise doing it because you can break hammers if you've never done it before. So there are certain things that are very, very detrimental.

But you know what? Water getting into the keys, not as horrendous as you might think. What would happen is the water would go through between the keys and go down to the bottom of the keybed.

And obviously it's not good. And the moisture, if it just stays in there, the moisture itself would be the biggest problem because the humidity would be so great that the felt bushings would start absorbing the moisture.

And it would make everything kind of mushy feeling.

But would it destroy your piano? Probably not. And the amount of water that might get through that hinge is probably negligible. So that piano probably was okay. Now obviously right after the show, having a piano technician go through and make sure there was no water on the soundboard and to clean up whatever water got through between the keys.

So those are the issues.

Now extreme examples like I mentioned earlier are kind of absurd.

Obviously a piano cannot survive being filled with water.

But generally speaking, moderate temperature and humidity, if water spills inside the piano and gets on the soundboard, that's an emergency situation. Short of that, getting on the cabinet, even on the keys, not as big a deal as it looks. That's a long and short of it. Again, I'm Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, your online piano store. Thanks to all you subscribers. The thumbs up, ringing the bell, it helps the channel to reach more piano lovers like you. See you next time.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/can-water-damage-your-piano/d

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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