Winter's toll on guitars

[diablo175]

Took 3 guitars to a local but renowned luthier for non-weather related repair and tweak issues. His first act was to check the necks, to which he immediately exclaimed,"Wow! This is off 3/100's... and this one is about 2/100's and this one is so bad it needs to go in our re-humidifying room STAT!

Not what you want to hear when he's handling your 3 and 4,000 dollar guitars...

So, it got me to thinking about two things:

1) Do I need to get a humidifier in my basement studio? It would seem the answer is pretty obvious.

2) What's the optimal humidity level setting for a small room (10 x 16 ) full of guitars? He had his work shop set at 55% My studio room is at 34%

On a side note- he was quite complimentary about the workmanship and materials of the two Hamers. Stating that they were "Boutique quality" ebony and maple, he admitted to always being impressed with Hamers.

[ib2010]

It's a good idea to have a humidity monitor in the room. Sometimes you can be quite surprised in the swings.---- 40-50 seems to be the happy zone. When we run the gas heat, i'll run the small humidifier to keep things from getting out of hand. ----Sometimes on a simple timer, 1 hour on ---1 hour off. just to avoid the really dry stuff. The 30$ "ultrasonic" models have worked well for me, with the bigger filtered ones ending up being a pain in the a.