Piano Care Continued

Your piano is a complex mechanism, consisting of over ten thousand moving parts. Each time you play a note there can be over one hundred parts in motion to make a felt hammer strike from one to three strings which will vibrate to create the piano sound.
There are over two hundred strings in a piano, each pulled to a tension of approximately 150 to 200 pounds, so you can see there could be a total tension in the piano of almost twenty tons! Your piano is tuned by adjusting the tension on each of these strings so that each note is in tune with all adjacent notes and in tune with itself. The pitch of the note A above middle C is tuned so that it vibrates at 440 Hz (an abbreviation for Hertz, a fancy name for cycles per second). A piano can be one of the major investments a family makes, ranking in expense with the family car, a bathroom makeover and such. When you consider the thousands of moving parts within a piano, all of which need dozens of adjustments and some of which need to be correct within thousandths of an inch, you can see there may be a possibility of something going amiss.
If you relate the care of your piano to the care of your car, it may be easier for you to understand. Think of tuning your piano as the oil and filter change, which must be done after so many miles. Most manufacturers recommend that a new piano be tuned four times during the first year of ownership and every six months thereafter. A rule of thumb for you is that your piano needs to be tuned after each 180 hours of play, but not less than once a year. If your piano is to be tuned only once a year, have it tuned at approximately the same time each year.
In addition to tuning, your piano should be checked regularly for proper operation (think brake job, tune-up or wheel alignment). All of those thousands of parts will start to wear out and go out of adjustment as you play your piano over the years. It is a simple matter for a piano technician to check the operation of your piano at the time of tuning and make recommendations for adjustments which need to be made. We feel it is better to take care of needed small repairs each time rather than waiting for a major problem (read major expense!) by putting off required maintenance.