We spend the cold winter evening in warm rooms, cuddling our beloved guitars in our arms… what an idyll. Not entirely, in fact most of us do more damage than good to our guitars. Generally we are not even aware of it.

Acoustic guitars are built in a lutherie workshop or in factories of a controlled level of humidity, approximately 50% of the relative humidity. This level of humidity is a widely accepted standard as it is the average humidity in most places in the world. Likewise, in the Summer in Poland humidity fluctuates in the range of 50-60%, on rainy days it reaches over 70%. In Winter, on frosty days, it falls below 40%. The fluctuation of humidity and temperature relative to the changes of the seasons of the year threaten the guitar. The most dangerous thing for our instrument, however, is what happens in heated rooms during the Winter.

Winter forces us to heat our houses. The use of central heating (or any other type of heating, for that matter) causes the excessive drying of the air. The relative humidity in a heated room drops in the Winter to 20%. Due to spending the entire Winter in such conditions of low humidity a guitar simply must succumb to excessive dryness. The symptoms of drying out become particularly visible in the early Spring and so, the effects of the few months of our “antiguitar” activity begin to surface.

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