The Best and Worst Places to Keep a Piano in Your Home

This is some great information about how the placement of a piano in your home can greatly affect its longevity.  This was originally posted by Bol Pianos Africa.

The Best Place In Your Home To Put Your Piano
In order to decide the best place to position your piano, you first need to know where NOT to put it. 
Climate and environment
It’s very important to achieve a constant temperature. Pianos don’t like being in a room that constantly changes temperature (cold at night, hot during the day etc.).
Try your best to keep your piano in a room that has the heating on the low side during the winter and is also not too hot and sticky in the summer.
A constant temperature of around 20 centigrade (65-70 Fahrenheit) and a humidity level of between 45 and 60 percent are ideal. The easiest way to keep an eye on this is to buy a humidifier gauge and stick it on the wall.
Central heating systems
A piano’s number one enemy!
When your heating is off during the night, the humidity rises; when it’s switched back on in the morning, the humidity drops. These changes in humidity cause the wood to expand and shrink, causing your piano to go out of tune. Over a long period of time, problems such as loose tuning pins, cracked soundboards, split bridges, wobbly hammers and loose keys can occur.
Central heating can cause the soundboard to crack. Cracked soundboards encourage buzzing noises to appear and in extreme cases, can completely deaden the sound of your piano.
Central heating can dry out the wrest plank. If this happens, the tuning pins that hold the high tension of the strings start to loosen. This results in your piano not being able to stay in tune.
Keep your piano away from heat sources
Keep your piano as far away from radiators or electric heaters as possible.
Never put your piano in a room that has under-floor heating! This will completely ruin your piano VERY quickly. If your whole house is fitted with under floor heating then all you can do is place a heavy rug underneath it. This will provide some protection for your piano.
Sunshine is very nice, but pianos don’t really care much for a tan!
Direct sunshine coming through a window can be a big problem for your piano…
Apart from disturbing the humidity level in your piano, direct sunshine is the cause of another serious issue - fading.
If your piano is under direct sunlight – even for a few days – the wood will start to fade.
A high gloss polyester finish can be completely ruined if left under direct sunlight for too long. Sunshine will also knock your piano out of tune.
Solution – keep your piano away from windows that let sunlight through, or place a heavy cover over your piano to protect it.
Kitchens are a threat
If you have an open floor plan (kitchen and living room together) you must keep your piano as far away from your kitchen as possible. The steam from cooking gets absorbed in the piano’s wood, resulting in an extreme level of humidity. This will cause many problems for your piano including: sluggish and sticking keys, slow hammers and dampers, swelling key lead and expanding felts. This excessive humidity can even cause tuning pins, bridge pins and strings to rust.
If, despite your best efforts to keep your piano away from harm. you still find you’ve got a problem, ask your piano tuner to fit a humidity control system inside your piano. This regulates the moisture content inside the piano.
Drafts
Pianos don’t get on well with drafts either.
If your piano is next to a window or an outside door, watch out! You’ll find that keys will start sticking, dampers will stop working and many other small annoyances will interfere with your piano’s performance. If you have double-glazed windows, this will reduce the problem.
Which room is best to put your piano?
For those of you lucky enough to have a purpose built music room, great.
Otherwise…
Your dining room is probably the next best place to keep your piano. Dining rooms tend to keep a more constant humidity level and have a lower temperature than other rooms in the house.
To summarise:
Where NOT to put your piano:
• Next to a window that lets in sunlight or drafts
• Next to an outside door
• Next to, or in front of a radiator or other heat source
• In a room with under floor heating
• Next to an open kitchen
• Next to, or underneath an air conditioning unit
• In a garage, shed or conservatory

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