Printer maintenance during closures

Think of your printer in the same way as you would your car. If you want it to work in the best way possible and stay in the best condition, you need to service it regularly and ensure maintenance is carried out to avoid breakdowns. The same applies when it comes to printing. Large format printers often run hundreds of cycles, so you need to treat them with the care they deserve.

Shutting your printer down for an extended period of time

Unfortunately, many printers are shut down until further notice right now. To avoid issues when your machines are back up and running, we thought we would share some important pointers.

• Firstly, it’s important to run a manual clean on each piece of equipment. This will ensure when you resume normal business, everything will be clean and ready to go.

• Check your ink cartridges and bottles to ensure there is plenty of ink available. A lot of printers will initiate an automatic maintenance cycle if it has been a while since it last printed anything.

• Make sure to empty the waste tank on your printer. This will ensure when you come back to printing, there won’t be too much waste ink flooding the caps. You can also buy a maintenance cartridge to help correctly empty and clean your printer. Some of the most popular ones are the 831 Latex Maintenance Cartridge and the 792 Printhead Cleaning kit.

• Whatever you do, do not simply unplug the machine to shut it down. You need to power down your printer using the machine itself to ensure it engages any capping mechanisms to prevent your cartridges from drying-out and often printers will carry out an auto clean at this stage too.

The exact steps to shut down a printer may vary between models, so it’s best to refer back to the specific instructions for your model or contact your account manager or our customer service team for further help.

Leaving your printer running rather than putting it into hibernation risks drying out the print heads. Not to mention the unnecessary electricity usage.

At the moment, Perfect Colours remains unaffected by the virus and we are seeing little disruption to our daily operations. Of course, we are adhering to all of the government guidelines during this time and taking all necessary precautions. However, we are still available to support our customers during this time for deliveries, installations and to provide answers to your questions.

If you would like to discuss the maintenance of your printer, shutting your printer off for an extended period of time, or anything else, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. Our team are on hand and more than happy to support you during these uncertain times.