The only real problem with cold is the risk that contracting strings will go sharp enough either to break outright, or, as happens frequently with brass, to have occult stress damage and hold a grudge until they break later. Sitting around at 50ºF surely isn’t going to cause any real problems. As for blankets, well, I think that unlike people, who use blankets to conserve the heat generated by the metabolism of their bodies, harpsichords are pretty much cold-blooded, and the blankets won’d do much of anything one way or the other.

The wood, of course, is mostly going to care about the relative humidity, and even with a significantly low dewpoint, the RH will probably be reasonable. If you apply conversion formulae from dewpoint and temperature to find the relative humidity, you quickly discover that the biggest factor is temperature, and that the legendarily dangerous dry conditions in an east-coast North American winter are largely attributable to the habit of over-heating dwellings rather radically.

I recently sent a 28-year-old Italian harpsichord from Oregon to the Chicago area in the van of some friends, and they reported overnights along the way dipping down as low as 6ºF, and yet the instrument arrived in good shape, and, reports are, almost perfectly in tune.

Now to delete 13 iterations of “Note: opinions expressed on …..” and almost as many repeats of previous posts. Perhaps a gentle word about editing is in order?

____________________________________


Owen Daly Early Keyboard Instruments
557 Statesman St. NE
Salem, OR 97301
http://www.dalyharpsichords.com
(503)-362-9396

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