How Long Should I Wait After Moving?

Table of contents for Piano Environment

  1. How To Measure Piano Humidity Swings
  2. How Does Humidity Affect My Piano?
  3. Where Should I Locate My Piano?
  4. How Long Should I Wait After Moving?

Topic Series Notes: Piano Environment

A good understanding of how humidity relates to the health of your piano has the potential of adding years of life to your piano. I believe every piano owner would benefit from reading these short articles.

My Opinion

The following article is probably the least important of the “Piano Environment” Series, but it is a question I am asked frequently and while it reflects my opinion about servicing a piano after moving it to a new location, perhaps it can also give insight into how rapidly humidity affects pianos.

General Sentiment ~ Piano Service After A Move


How long should you wait ~ after moving your piano to have it tuned?

How long should you wait ~ after moving your piano to have it tuned?


After moving your piano into a new home, the general sentiment is to wait before tuning. The logic behind this waiting is to allow the piano time to condition itself to the new environment.

Let us think about this for a moment by asking a question; “How long do you think it would take for a drop of water to soak into a piece of wood?” Answer: Not long ~ minutes, right? This is not a fair comparison because pianos have protective lacquers and sealant, nevertheless I wanted to get you thinking in the correct direction to dispel the many myths about waiting for weeks or even months before tuning your piano after moving ~ which is ridiculous, in my opinion.

Dispelling Myths About Piano Service After Moving

Piano Moving MythsIt has been proven that no piano, no matter what size, brand, or model, will stay perfectly tuned ~ exactly where the tuner set the strings ~ for 24 hours unless the piano is in a laboratory with exact climate control. This tells us that shifting humidity within 24 hours affects the the wood within a piano.  Pianos serviced in storage, for piano dealers, where doors are opening and closing many times need re-tuning within minutes because of the shifting environment.

Understanding this rapid acceleration of humidity change within the piano makes accepting myths about waiting several weeks before tuning a piano in its new environment difficult to accept.

Another concept of piano settling concerns the level of the floor where the piano is sitting. In other words, the floor might not have the same level, therefore the construction of the piano shifts and needs more time to settle before tuning. But let me ask you a simple question; “Have you ever moved a table across the room and discovered the floor not as level as where you moved it from and now the table is rocking?” ~ of course you have.

So then if a piano being moved to another area needs to settle before tuning, then why is it we tuners, on a regular basis, walk into our customer’s homes and discover the piano has been moved and yet the tuning is no more out of tune than normal? Or when a piano has been moved shortly after a tuning within the same room or home where the humidity has remained fairly consistent the piano is still holding tune?

The fact is this type of settling within the framework of a piano affects tuning so little that even trained piano technicians would have a hard time noticing the difference. When pianos do go out of tune when being moved from one wall to another within the same room, it has been my experience, from checking the hygrometer sitting on top of the piano, the piano has gone through a humidity swing and it is the unstable humidity in the new area that cased the piano to go out of tune, not the floor or the piano settling.

Years ago I talked to a technician at a piano convention and he told an interesting story that relates to this subject about settling. He tuned a nine foot concert Steinway grand piano for a concert before the piano was moved into the concert hall. It was winter and extremely cold outside so the piano movers did everything they could to protect the piano from the extreme cold. They wrapped the piano in several layers of blankets and made sure the moving van was also fairly warm. After wrapping the piano they moved the piano as quickly as possible from the dealers showroom to the van and from the van to the concert hall. When they unwrapped the piano the air under the blankets was still warm and when the piano technician checked the piano it was still in good tune ~ proving once again that it is not the move but the changing of humidity and environment that causes a piano to lose it’s tune.

Another point about settling has to do with new piano strings stretching. New pianos go out of tune quickly because the new strings stretch. To compensate for this stretching, piano manufacturers recommend new pianos be tuned at least three or four times the first year. Yet many piano dealers recommend waiting before having your new piano tuned after moving the piano into your home. Why? No matter how long you wait, until the strings become fully stretched (by having them tuned) a new piano is not going to hold tuning for long anyway ~ the sooner you have your new piano tuned three or four times the sooner you get to enjoy a stable piano.

I would assume most, if not all experienced piano tuners have been called to service a piano 10, 15 or 20 years old and yet has never been tuned. Such a piano after settling for so many years still acts like a new unstable piano because the strings have not been pulled up to pitch the required number of times to remove the stretch ~ for them to become fully stretched. In other words, it is not the length of time the piano settles but the number of tunings required to stabilize a new piano. A new piano, or a piano 10, 15 or 20 years old that has never been serviced needs tuning three or four times before stabilizing. The only exception is when a new piano has been sitting on the showroom floor for many months and has gone through several in-house, or showroom tunings before purchased.

There have been other myths in the piano tuning business that have been disproven such as pianos very low in pitch needing more than one appointment to bring them up to standard. Thirty years ago most tuners would tell you to bring up, a very out of tune piano to standard pitch required two, three or perhaps even four appointments. Today, reputable tuners know that is not true and if the piano is in good shape there is no reason to not bring it up to pitch in one appointment. But this myth about pianos needing to settle for weeks before tuning is still hanging around. You hear it all the time from dealers, teachers and even other piano tuners. It is simply not true.

Don’t be fooled by piano dealers advising you to wait ~ hoping you will forget so they will never have to pay for the free tunings they promised. But I cannot completely blame dealers for keeping this myth alive, after all they are at the mercy of the technicians who advise them and many piano tuners also buy-into this myth about pianos needing to settle after a move.

I believe there is nothing to be gained by waiting more than 72 hours after a piano move to have your piano serviced and certainly waiting a week is plenty of time. When your piano arrives in your home, call your piano tuner immediately. The chances are he will not be able to work you into his schedule for one, two or three weeks anyway, so call him while it is on your mind and schedule an appointment.

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