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When you notice thin white lines or fading across printouts, this could indicate that the ink nozzles need to be cleaned.  Regular cleaning can maintain print quality and prolong the life of your printer.

Almost all inkjet printers have a software program with built-in self-cleaning utility.  The self-cleaning program can be manually activated through this software or through printer properties in the “Printers Folder” from your computer.  Look for a tab or click box that may be labelled “Maintenance” and click this to start the process.  What this process actually does is force some ink through the print heads hopefully flushing out and dislodging any dried up ink, dust or any tiny foreign obstruction.  But if your printer has not been used regularly or the clog is really stubborn, the self-cleaning program might not work and you will have to do the cleaning yourself.

To clean your print head, you may use either isopropyl alcohol or simply just hot water.  So what is your print head?  A print head is the device that sprays the droplets of ink onto the paper.  It could be either part of the ink cartridge itself or attached as part of the printer.  To identify the print head, remove your cartridge, turn it over and see if there are thin slits in a copper colored plate with an electronic strip.

Print head under cartridge

If there is no copper around the bottom of the ink cartridge, then the print head is part of the printer.  In this case the ink cartridge is just a reservoir for holding the ink and there can be nothing done to the cartridge itself.

No print head

The printer head in these types of cartridges is the unit that the cartridges sit in.  You might be in luck and this unit might be removable, but otherwise I would not recommend fussing with it.  Let a professional do it.

For the do-it-yourselvers, here’s how you can do it. Dip a cotton swab in hot water or isopropyl alcohol and rub it against the print head until color starts to bleed out. Be careful, especially if you use isopropyl alcohol to clean your print heads.  Some printers use rubber gaskets and if you get isopropyl alcohol on the gaskets, it could dry them out, resulting in printer ink leaking.

If you have a removable print head, remove the ink cartridge from the print head and take the print head out of your printer. Put some isopropyl alcohol or hot water into a saucer and set the printer head in the saucer and let it soak overnight. Air dry it, reinstall it in your computer, place the cartridge in and run a cleaning cycle. This should get rid of any dried ink that was loosened during the soaking.

Good luck all.  If you have any questions please feel free to call us at 866-274-2821.  And when you do run out of ink, take a look at our ink cartridges online.  We offer some of the best prices on the internet.

Tags: cleaning, maintenance, print head

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 24th, 2009 at 2:05 pm and is filed under Ink Cartridges. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.