It’s been a few months since I’ve written about my mom, but after a weekend trip to visit my parents, she gave me a good topic for this week — inkjet printer maintenance.
When I get to my parents’ house, sooner or later my mom will ask if I can look at something that’s not quite working right. This time, it was her printer.
I bought this printer for her more than a year ago. It’s an Epson all-in-one inkjet printer that can print wirelessly from your iPad.
The printer stopped printing a few weeks ago.
Upon examination, it really hadn’t stopped working. It was still taking paper through and acting like it was printing, but the paper came out blank.
My first troubleshooting step is to go into the printer’s menus and look for the maintenance section under setup.
There is a printer nozzle check there that prints a small pattern of lines from each of the printer’s four ink nozzles (black, cyan, magenta and yellow).
The nozzle check showed the colored inks were printing fine, but the black ink was not printing at all.
This means the printhead was clogged.
When the nozzle check is complete, you’ll have two choices on the screen — “finish” or “clean the nozzles.”
I chose “clean the nozzles,” which takes about two minutes, and then I ran another nozzle check.
In mom’s case, the black was still not printing at all, and there were still some issues with the other three colors. Epson says to clean the nozzles up to four times if necessary.
If the color bands are not printing correctly after four cleanings, leave the printer powered on for at least six hours and try again.
Mom’s printer started behaving correctly after the third nozzle cleaning, although she did get a message to replace the black ink.
I should mention that when a printer is cleaning the nozzles, all it is doing is shooting ink through all the nozzles in an attempt to dislodge any dried ink. So repeated cleaning really uses up ink. I made a trip to the store for more ink, and she was back in business.
What can you do to prevent ink nozzle clogging?
Use your printer regularly.
I try to print something from my printer at least once a week, if not more often.
In the summer at my house, we might not use the printer but once a month or less. I keep a recurring event on my calendar to remind myself to send something through the printer.
A page with at least one picture that uses all the ink colors is a good way to keep all those nozzles clean and happy.
