Like Bruce I'm in Minnesota, except that I don't even attempt to control humidity; there is no point.  I'm trying to baby my already-rotted-from-condensation-windows a few more years as it is.  Raising the humidity in the winter any more than necessary is out of the question.  I have a humidifier in the bedroom for night time in the winter, but that is it.  Besides the water is so hard that fills the humidifier with deposits in a matter of weeks.

There really isn't any such thing as equilibrium here.  Before reading this thread of post, I serendipitously happened to be reading the recent weather.  A few days ago outdoor relative humidity went from 17% to 61% in a matter of 7 hours, and not because of rain.  Everything is constantly in the process of gaining or losing moisture.  And even indoors, the extremes are unavoidable, from 20% in the winter (when it is -20F outside) to over 80% in the summer _after_ air conditioning when it is 100F out and the wind is blowing from across the lake.

Thing is, my 16 year old ZHI flemish single has never cracked its soundboard, go figure.  The only problem I have is that the case expansion makes it unplayable in the summer due the keyboard being too low (I must have voiced it in the winter), which would easily be fixed once I get around to putting jack screws under the back of the keyboard.  I did attach the bottom with screws rather than gluing it.  I figured that it was similar to the pegs the Ruckers used, and would allow for some expansion and contraction without blowing out a glue seam or tearing the rest of the instrument apart.

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