Disklavier

Just to clarify a bit of reality here… the circuitry of all of these pianos is relatively conventional. There are no magic secret batteries or bits of memory that take a long time to drain or whatever… and suggestions that it’s needed to unplug the piano for anything longer than 30 seconds are simply wrong, as far as rebooting the electronics. The only thing in these pianos holding a charge of any significance are the capacitors, and even the biggest and baddest of those, in these pianos, are fully drained after 15 seconds. Thirty, if you want to be super-duper sure. But 40 minutes? An hour? Makes no difference.

That being said, if you’re finding that your piano works best (and reliably) after unplugging it for an hour or more, then you have indeed identified a problem, but it’s not one that's resolved by rebooting.

The issue in that case is overheating… and unplugging it for an hour or more simply gives it a chance to cool down. 

The two most common issues that cause overheating are a cooling-fan failures and the accumulation of dust. These pianos are wonderfully designed not to need cooling fans (even the silent ones are noisy, and when they fail they’re awfully noisy), and therefore, the only issue might be restricted airflow. These M4s have two main components that are relevant, the power supply and the I/O board. They’re the ones enclosed in those metal boxes, and if you crawl under the piano on your back, you’ll see those metal boxes and how full of holes they are. What’s lost without a fan is gained by having as many holes as possible, to promote cooling from ambient airflow… and it works very well, provided those holes aren’t covered In dust.

Blow compressed air, suck it with a (not too strong) vacuum, whatever. If you’re finding that your piano gets unhappy after being on for a while, and a long-term reboot seems to resolve the issue, this is quite likely what’s going on.

To answer a couple of other questions that have appeared in this thread, it is indeed important to fully unplug the piano. There’s a lot going on in “stand-by” mode. Unplugging the main guarantees that nothing anywhere is getting any power, and indeed, it’s the primary (and only) source of power to the piano. Various components are powered from the power supply (you can see the distribution of that power when you look at it, as per two paragraphs above), but it’s all fed from one single plug.

With respect to power spikes… a UPS/line-conditioner is a really good idea with an expensive and somewhat-sensitive instrument like this. It won’t prevent a power supply from failing and frying your I/O board (rare, but it happened to someone and I’ve had it happen to a computer as well — just rotten luck) but it will prevent the sort of spikes that could cause problems.

While lightning strikes are unlikely, far likelier are power outages, and corresponding surges when power is restored. Those can cause serious issues… and a UPS addresses both. And also provides even and reliable electricity.

…..HK

> On Apr 26, 2019, at 11:01 AM, master-12l@... [disklavier] <disklavier@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Good day:)
> 
> Thanks for the answer.
> Really need to turn off so long? I turned off but a maximum of a minute.
> 
> It is necessary to switch off completely the unit where the power is distributed and where does everything else already feed from?
> 
>