How Do I Look After My Climate Control System?
Is your Edelweiss Piano fitted with a Climate Control System? Have you forgotten what maintenance this system needs and when? Or maybe you’ve just had your self-playing piano delivered and would like further information? Either way, this quick article covers off everything you need to know about your custom piano’s Climate Control System.
What Does a Climate Control System Do?
This is a great question, and it’s important we understand this before we go any further into maintenance of the system itself. The Edelweiss Climate Control System controls the humidity (moisture level in the air) immediately surrounding your piano. Being manufactured primarily from wood, any piano is highly susceptible to humidity changes – if humidity goes up, your piano will take on moisture; if humidity drops, your piano will dry out. Either way, if left unchecked significant changes in humidity can cause irreparable damage to your piano over time. The Climate Control System contains both a humidifier and a de-humidifier so when overall humidity drops, the humidifier switches on and releases water vapor beneath the piano soundboard to keep relative humidity immediately surrounding the piano consistent, and vice versa for when overall humidity increases.
The ideal range for any piano is 40 – 60% relative humidity (your Edelweiss Piano will have been supplied with a hygrometer to help you measure this) and the Climate Control System ensures that your piano’s micro-environment is maintained within this optimum humidity range.
What Affects Humidity?
Anything from the weather through the country you live in to switching on your heating impacts the relative humidity in your home! We would always recommend installing a Climate Control System on any piano installed in a room fitted with underfloor heating and also for any pianos delivered to countries outside of the EU.
So What does My Player Piano’s Climate Control System look like?
The Edelweiss piano system is fitted completely underneath our grand pianos totally out of sight so you should not notice too much of it! There is just one thing you do need to see, the system indicator lights and you also need to know where the top-up hose is. The picture below shows where both of these will usually be located on your self-playing piano:
What Maintenance Do I Need to Do?
Ongoing maintenance is very simple, you will only be required to do two things:
- Ensure the Climate Control System remains plugged in
Always ensure the power cord isplugged into the mains, it is important that your Climate Control System remains on and active whatever the weather! Do not unplug if the weather seems “nice enough” -the system requires a constant supply of power to do its job properly and the green ‘POWER’ light should always be on. If your piano is also fitted with a self-play system, everything will be powered by the one socket your delivery team plugged in when your piano was first installed.
2. Fill or Top-Up the water when required
A Water Top-Up is required when the yellow ‘WATER’ light is flashing. It’s important to only fill up when the light is flashing – do not just fill it every Friday/once a week please only fill when the system asks you to!
How do I Top-Up My System?
As daunting as it may sound, this is very simple – simply follow the steps shown in the video below and your system will continue functioning perfectly
Other Useful Facts To Know
The points above cover all you need to know about your Climate Control System on a day-to-day basis; there are some further useful tips we are pleased to share with you about your system:
- YELLOW (AMBER) ‘WATER’ LIGHT IS FLASHING: you need to top-up the water in your system as set out above
- RED ‘PADS’ LIGHT IS FLASHING: your systems pads need replacing and this does require a technician to attend – please call our TotalCare Team on 0044 (0)1223 881691 and we will arrange this for you
- BOTH ‘PADS’ & ‘WATER’ LIGHTS ARE FLASHING: first fill up the water as set out above, it may be your system has run completely dry and both lights will turn off about 10mins after you have done this. If the red ‘PADS’ light continues to flash, then your system needs its pads replaced as set out in the above step.
TotalCare – Your Hassle Free Option
If this all sounds a bit too much, you can always sign up to one of our TotalCare Piano Care Subscriptions. With regular scheduled visits, full Climate Control support and much much more, these care plans have been created for your complete peace of mind and basically mean that you hand the responsibility of caring for your piano over to us! You will still need to top-up the Climate Control System when required, but our friendly team will be on hand to guide and train you through this process if needed.
Want to discuss TotalCare Options for your self-playing piano? Click here, leave your details and one of our team will be in touch.
