True music experts
“I’ve been waiting for a solution like this for 30 years!” - Juha Huotari, a piano technician at F-Musiikki Oy
F-Musiikki Oy is the largest music store in the Nordic countries. They also provide a variety of additional services such as repairs and tuning. Concert halls, music schools, and individual consumers are among their clients.
Juha Huotari is the top expert in the field with over 30 years of experience. We asked him how F-Musiikki Oy preserves grand pianos with Loggs humidity monitoring system.
Protecting the precious instruments
The humidity inside pianos has to constantly be monitored. Even tiny drops in humidity level can ruin the instrument’s tuning. In the worst scenarios, the instrument’s wooden body can even break.
Re-tuning takes a lot of time and effort. For that reason, premium pianos are kept in locations with controlled humidity. Another solution is to have an expert install a special, automatic humidity control system into your instrument (Piano Life Saver).
However, you may forget to fill in the humidifier’s water tank or plug it into the socket. On top of that, the humidifier inside the instrument or room humidifying systems can break down. Simply leaving the room door open can cause damaging variations in humidity levels. In such cases, it’s crucial to get notifications about the incident to avoid losses.
Huotari says half a day in incorrect humidity is enough for a piano to go out of tune. After the room humidity is normalized, even more time has to pass before the piano’s own humidity is normalized as well. If the piano’s humidity level has changed a lot, it may take 1-2 weeks to stabilize.
Once F-Musiikki Oy tuned 30 pianos at a music school. After a couple of weeks, the humidity level went too low because the humidifying system broke down. All of the time and money spent on tuning was wasted. Another unfortunate case happened when a customer didn’t notice the humidifier failure and 100 pianos needed to be re-tuned.
Hundreds of saved pianos
Thanks to the monitoring solution by Loggs, F-Musiikki Oy now easily monitors the humidity level in any locations and rooms with premium pianos, even right inside the instruments. Moreover, F-Musiikki Oy receives instant warnings about drops in humidity levels and is able to prevent serious damages on time.
There are many grand piano owners among F-Musiikki Oy’s customers. There was one case when a humidifier didn’t work properly at the customer’s home. Loggs system notified about the issue on time and a better humidifier was installed to keep the instrument safe. Since the customer often works abroad, real-time monitoring is necessary. Thanks to the Loggs mobile app, he can check the humidity levels whenever he wants.
F-Musiikki uses many different devices for monitoring. One of the key advantages is that wireless sensors are easy to set up and move to another place together with the piano. Moreover, managing different devices is simple because they’re all controlled on a single platform, Loggs Cloud.
Availability of historical data, precise measurements, appropriate pricing and service support are among the top things F-Musiikki Oy appreciates in Loggs. Huotari admits it’s also important that Loggs is a domestic partner in Finland: always available for help and can be easily reached by phone.
