I wonder where in Oregon Tom lives. The notion that it is constantly very humid in Oregon is for the most part a canard, like the notion that it rains here all the time (and I’m referring to west of the Cascades, not the high-desert east-side). 80% most of the year? I hardly think so.
In my experience the humidity is most of the time fairly benign. On a really chilly rainy day, if you don’t have the heat on, my shop can get an RH as high as around 60%, and, in fact, in the winter-time, we sometimes DO get big masses of arctic air rotating clockwise down out of the gulf of Alaska, such that if one has east-coast heating habits, and insists on keeping the whole house up in the 70ºsF all the time, the RH can get down into the teens. On the odd heat-wave in the dog-days of August, I suppose it can get pretty dry.
But I’d say, after living here over 30 years, that in general the RH hovers in a reasonable enough swath between 40% and 60%, probably more often than not around 50% (right now, early Friday morning, the temp outside (and inside, because there is no need to have any heat on indoors) is 66ºF and the RH is 53%. Tomorrow will be hot (for the season) and sunny, and the RH will be in the 30s. By Monday, rain and it will be in the 40%’s.
In general you shouldn’t need to do much of any artificial fiddling with humidity in the pacific northwest, except possibly some spot-humidification with a cheap portable ultra-sound humidifier when the high-pressure ridges come down from Alaska in January for a couple of days, and if the instrument is well-made, you shouldn’t need to give it much thought.
Our house doesn’t have central heating, but a simple gas-heat-stove in the central room, which keeps things comfortably warm there during cold rainy times and even during the rare snowfall, but the outlying rooms are progressively cooler, and the instruments generally, unless I take them out for gigs, rarely need serious tuning more than once or twice a month.
So: typically we can reach all the extremes, but never (I say “never” advisedly here) do we have long stretches of chronically-the-same humidity, whether high (I think I’ve never experienced 80% here in all the time I lived in Oregon) OR low. It can yo-yo short term back and forth quite a bit, though.
owen
____________________________________
Owen Daly Early Keyboard Instruments
557 Statesman St. NE
Salem, OR 97301
http://www.dalyharpsichords.com
(503)-362-9396
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