Buying & Maintaining a Piano
Colorado's Dry Climate Is Your Piano's Biggest Enemy
More than playing, more than age, it's Colorado's humidity swings that knock your piano out of tune — and can damage it. Here's what's happening inside, and how to protect it.
Why Colorado is hard on pianos
A piano is mostly wood and felt wrapped around 20-plus tons of string tension. Wood swells when the air is damp and shrinks when it's dry — and along the Front Range, the air does both, dramatically, across a single year. That constant movement is the number-one reason Colorado pianos drift out of tune and, over time, develop real problems.
Our dry baseline is only part of the story. The swings are what hurt:
- Winter: furnaces dry indoor air to 10–20% humidity (sometimes less) — brutally dry for wood.
- Summer: swamp (evaporative) coolers can push indoor humidity to 60–80%.
- Spring & late-summer storms: sudden jumps in moisture, then back down.
What that does inside your piano
The soundboard — the large wooden diaphragm under the strings — crowns up when humid and flattens when dry. As it moves, string tension changes and the piano goes out of tune, even if nobody touches it. Swing far enough, often enough, and the damage becomes permanent:
- Soundboard cracks, which can buzz and lose tone
- A cracked or loosened pinblock, so the piano can't hold a tuning
- Loose action parts that rattle and change the touch
- Rust on strings and tuning pins
How to protect your piano
You can't change Colorado's weather, but you can buffer your piano from it. In order of impact:
- Keep it away from exterior doors, vents, fireplaces, and direct sun — anywhere the temperature spikes.
- Aim for stable indoor humidity year-round. Running A/C instead of a swamp cooler helps in summer; a whole-house humidifier helps in winter.
- Install a Dampp-Chaser Piano Life-Saver system. It lives inside the piano and holds the moisture around 42% all year — the single most effective protection for a Colorado piano.
- Keep up a regular tuning schedule so small drifts get corrected before they become big ones.
We install and service Dampp-Chaser systems and can assess your piano's environment during a visit. If you own a fine or heirloom piano in Colorado, climate control isn't a luxury — it's the cheapest insurance there is.