Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Forum Question about Grand Piano lid positions

Very much so! Thanks Carbonblob

One other thing I've been meaning to ask; Not sure if Carbonblob's tech is still there. What is an acceptable range of relative humidity in the piano room?

Hey BrianDX,

He's still here. I'll ask when he's done tuning. I think if you do a search here, there's a lot posted on the best range. If I recall, the real challenge is getting the right hygrometer and they usually suggest having 2 to get an average.

I think if you click on the damp-chase ad they have a chart showing the best range. I think something like 45% is best? I'll ask.

btw......I don't know how these techs can sit for hours tuning at such a high awareness! I'm exhausted just listening. It takes a great deal of patience, that's for sure. He loves to play Chopin, which I insist he plays for me....lol (Last time he played the Fantasy Impromptu....wow).

Hey Brian,

He said 42% is the best range. He said my damp chase is helping the bottom of the piano but there's little it will do for the topside. Since I'm so close to the ocean, I have a string cover and quilted cover to combat the humidity and salt air. He told me the damp chase and string cover is the best combo for my environment. I lamented that I can't see the innards, which he replied; you'll be thanking yourself ten years from now when the inside looks like new! I hope your environment is much more stable than mine. You might be able to humidify your room which would be ideal. Gotta run.....ft

42.5% is not necessarily the best goal; the RH should be set based on your location and how your room fluctuates. Know your room throughout the seasons and pick a number that creates the most stability for your piano. For my area/apartment in the US, it's c.50%.

It is interesting that when you take the advice of physicians, veterinarians, botanists, and piano builders, it seems the optimal range for People, Plants, Pets, and Pianos is ~40-50%. However, tropical plants, such as orchids, can be tricky.

Seasonal stability is the most important goal.

Brian, what type of climate zone are you located in?

We are six miles from the ocean (Southern Delaware), however our house is new and has a state of the art climate control system (so we were told!) for both heating and cooling.

We have had the hygrometer in the piano room for about a week. The readings have ranged from a low of 45% to a high of 55%. However, we are in the transitional period between heating and cooling so I'll be interested in how the air conditioner performs in this regard.

I think you mean the 'hygrometer' if it is a device for measuring RH. The humidistat is the controller for a humidifier. It's almost as bad as lay, laid, and lain.

(help me, please help me)

Your current RH range is excellent. Keep an eye on it as summer erupts. Do you have a humidifier in the HVAC system for the winter?

Yep. Already fixed in my post

Our HVAC system does have a humidifier for the winter, and I'm thinking that the humidity levels never got too low (Of course I never measured it).

Brian, you seem to be all set. Keep monitoring the RH and make any adjustments to the HVAC as necessary.

BrianDX,

I agree with Marty and others, just keep the humidity from wildly swinging and it should be fine, especially with your new HVAC system. I sometimes play the piano with the sliding door open to the patio (I know everyone just fainted when they read that). My tech told me the piano was one cycle off, so that's not bad!

I decided I wasn't going to get stressed about certain aspects of maintaining a piano. I like hearing the outdoors and I wasn't going to chase around closing doors and being a piano cop. Some on this forum already think it's too late and I might have already made a cover to cover my cover!

… and that is a completely ridiculous situation. Nearly all “modern” piano lids are too heavy for most people to handle without a grunt or two.

That piano makers can get by with treating their potential customers (and then owners) with such contempt is beyond me. It was not always such. For several centuries—you know, back in the old days when they did yet know what they could get by with—piano makers made piano lids that could be raised and lowered by mere humans without any assistance from the gods. And then along came polyester.

A flat, non-warping surface is required underneath high-polish polyester finishes. And the obvious material of choice was something with the ubiquitous name, MDF (medium density fiberboard). Wood fibers mixed with an adhesive resin and baked until finished. The stuff comes out flat, reasonably stable and it’s cheap. Cheap to buy and cheap to work with. The only problem is that it is also, despite the “medium” in the name, some very heavy stuff. But, so what, it’s only a piano lid and who cares if the average mortal can’t lift the thing. By the time the hapless buyer figures out just how awkward and difficult it is to lift the damn thing we’ll have the sale, their check will have cleared the bank and it’s hardly a warrantee issue, is it? And doesn’t that flat, shiny surface look pretty?

It doesn’t have to be this way. Fiberboard comes in three broadly defined types.
— Low-density fiberboard (LDF) weighs in at between 500 and 640 kg/m3 (≈31 to 40 lbs/ft3) with the average being around 560 kg/m3, or ≈35 lb/ft3.)
— Medium-density fiberboard (MDF) weighs between 640 and 800 kb/m3 (≈40 to 50 lbs/ft3) with the average being around 720 kg/m3, or ≈45 lbs/ft3.
— High-density fiberboard (HDF) weighs between 800 and 1,000 kg/m3 (≈50 to 62 lbs/ft3) with the average being around 900 kb/m3, or 56 lbs/ft3.
Depending on who is doing the rating and precisely what it is being rated—one manufacturer’s MDF might be another companies HDF—there is some overlap in defining the exact density of these materials.

By comparison, the weight of “poplar”—poplar being a generic name applied to several relatively lightweight hardwoods—is generally between 500 kg/m3 (≈ 31 lbs/ft3) and 600 kg/m3 (≈ 38 lbs/ft3). Since poplar was used as a core material for piano lids for several centuries it is what we’d kind of grown used to. By comparison the typical MDF lid feels quite heavy. And if the piano maker happened to get a batch of MDF having a density more closely resembling HDF those lids can get even heavier.

Sadly, this is not an unusual occurrence. Many piano makers do not know exactly what they are really buying or what they are really getting and the weight of grand piano lids can vary considerably between batches. The weight of the lids fitted to typical 150 cm (4’ 11”) grands weighs around 27 to 32 kg (60 to 70 lbs). But if the panel stock is on the heavy side this can go higher. Sometimes much higher. At a NAMM show a couple of years back I encountered a woman trying to lift the lid of a common 157 cm (5’ 2”) grand. I stopped and asked if she could use some help but she said, “No, I want to see if I can do this myself.” And, with some difficulty, she did get it up. But she also told me, “I would never have a piano with a lid this heavy in my store! I’d be embarrassed and ashamed to demonstrate it to my customers.”

This does not have to be. Piano lids can be engineered and constructed to be much lighter than they are today. Notice that the density range listed for poplar is almost exactly the same as the density range for LDF. A little engineering will have to be done to accommodate fasteners, etc., but the results would be much more user-friendly piano lids. There is no rational excuse for any piano lid being so heavy average humans have to struggle to lift them.

ddf

Also worth mentioning that some pianos have hydraulic lid systems and only take a single pinky finger to raise or lower. It's impressive.

Yes, it does work. And it works quite nicely. But…it’s also one more thing that can (and ultimately will) fail and/or create servicing problems. And the only reason they may end up like the “soft-fall” key cover is that manufacturers can’t/won’t be bothered to put a little effort into designing and building lids the don’t require the body strength of Atlas to lift them.

For several hundred years piano makers were able to make pianos with keycovers that were light weight and properly counterbalanced. They required little effort to raise and lower them. And, if they slipped out of one’s hand, they would not drop and break fingers. And then came along MDF and the weight of keycovers doubled. The solution? Rather than put some effort into building a proper keycover the soft-fall mechanism was introduced. Yes, it works but it can also be troublesome. They cannot be serviced; only replaced. And we are already reaching the point where some of the early versions are deteriorating and exact replacements are not available.

A “soft-fall” mechanism will be the same for grand lids. They work. No question about that. But, like the soft-fall mechanism for keycovers, they should not be necessary. Design lethargy reigns.

ddf

So worth mentioning that I mentioned it earlier on this very page.

I'd much rather to have my piano lid made out of poplar or some other local wood, than the MDF that it came with.
I'm curious Del if 'alder' would suffice. It grows in abundance here in this region (Pacific NW), especially after clearcuts of native species.

Gotta say-- "props" to Steinway and Charles Walter for using real wood in their lids. I have NO trouble raising and lowering the lid of my piano as many times as I want. I've raised and lowered lids on D's by myself as well-- no sweat!

Sophia

meh--I think of it as encouragement to maintain some upper body strength!

You're a time traveler. I didn't realize......

At an average of just under 480 kg/m3 (30 lbs/ft3) it is even better than many of the species that make up the so-called "poplar" group. When dried and aged properly it is quite stable. It is used as a core material in much of the lumber-core plywood made in the NW.

ddf