Well,

This afternoon, I tuned 2 Schimmel's in the same home. One grand, oh, I don't know about 7'4" or so, the other a vertical T-120 model.

Where the grand was located, remember now, it also went up to 60 degree's here today and was in the 50's yesterday as well, the RH factor was 33%.
If the weather was like it has been, the RH factor probably would have been in the mid 25 % range.

When I walked into the other room to tune the 2nd piano, which was not all that far away from the grand, just through the kitchen area, I discovered that she had just had her carpeting cleaned. The floor was still sopping wet. Consequently, I got my socks SOAKED too.

However, in this room, the RH factor was 54 %!!!
A considerable difference due to cleaning the carpeting in that room.

On top of all that, in raising pitch on this vertical, I broke B-4. Hell of a place for it to break. Wound (pardon the pun) up getting my socks wet, my pants wet, my knee's wet and was not a happy camper by the time I was finished!!!

All in all, don't have carpeting cleaned on the same day as the tuning!!!

I warned her that when the carpeting dried out, the RH would drop and the tuning will go out too... OH WELL!

Jerry,

What are people thinking?

I had the same thing happen on an old Chickering Quarter Grand years ago. I don't know what type of cleaner they were using, but by the time I got there all of the strings were covered with rust. I tried a few and most of the ones I put a hammer to broke.

I told her the piano needed to be restrung, and that it would cost a fair amount of money to do that along with all the other work necessary to make THAT even worthwhile. She told me to just go ahead and fix the ones that broke...

I should have just left, but in the end, I got some valuable stringing experience from it.

I shudder to think about it. Not a job I'd ever take on again.

Jerry,

I used to have a BIG problem with this in the schools. When you are managing 6 school districts, 390 schools, this was coming up almost every week.

Eventually I had to have a sit down with the district maintenance managers because I could not get the union members of the cleaning teams to listen to the advice. The pianos would be left in the same room as the cleaning, then the teacher would complain about the service not being correct, I would file a report about the carpets and round and round it would all go.
Eventually it came down to getting the teachers to demand that the cleaning crews remove the instruments previous to cleaning the carpets. So the (union) teachers were listened to by the (union) cleaning team but they would not listen to me….funny thing that……

Either way there is another tuning, but moving the instrument out of the area resulted in less repairs. For the home owner it is mostly thoughtlessness, it just does not occur to them what happens to the instrument.

Dan Silverwood
www.silverwoodpianos.com