Barry Shultz

Take Your Printer On Vacation

A person wrote to me and expressed concerns about leaving his inkjetprinter unattended for 3 months. While it may not be a problem he wascorrectly concerned about what he might come back to. A clogged printhead. Which could result in a costly repair.

Under normal circumstances an inkjet printer will work fine if it has not been used for up to a week, however, any time beyond that MAY cause problems. I emphasize the word MAY because I have been told by some people that they stored a printer in the closet for over a year and it printed perfectly the first time out. At the opposite end I have had people say that if they don't use the printer at least every couple of days that their print heads dry up, resulting in a frustrating routine of deep head cleanings and cartridge replacements.

Here is what I suggested Roy to do:

Ideally it would be great if somebody could run a cleaning routine once a week on it but probably not feasible in your case. If you remove the cartridges it would just make things worse because air would permeate the print heads and it's the heads you want to protect, not the cartridges. I would just leave the cartridges in and hope for the best.

Another alternative is to take the printer with you and use the buttons on the front panel to manually do a cleaning every so often.

If you can locate some cleaning cartridges on the net, just install them and run a few head cleanings, leave the cleaning cartridges in the printer then turn it off and enjoy your trip. The cleaning fluid will keep your print heads moist and ready to print when you get back. Tape up your ink cartridges and store them in an upright position, i.e., the normal position they would be in if they were in your printer.

While Roy's 3 month leave is probably the exception rather than the normit still raises the question of what to do in his situation. He decided to donothing and hope for the best which was probably the best choice.

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