{"id":213,"date":"2008-11-04T15:05:30","date_gmt":"2008-11-04T23:05:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tripinsurancestore.com\/blog\/how-to-clean-clogged-inkjet-printheads\/"},"modified":"2008-11-04T15:05:30","modified_gmt":"2008-11-04T23:05:30","slug":"how-to-clean-clogged-inkjet-printheads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tripinsurancestore.com\/blog\/how-to-clean-clogged-inkjet-printheads\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Clean Clogged Inkjet Printheads"},"content":{"rendered":"
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How to Clean Clogged Inkjet Printheads<\/strong>
\nby Blake W Patterson<\/p>\n

A clogged print head on your inkjet printer is not a fine thing. Over time (especially when there’s long periods of no printer use) the many tiny holes that make up a modern inkjet printer’s head can become clogged with dried ink. <\/p>\n

Most printers today have some sort of cleaning routine where either you instruct the printer to go through a cleaning cycle via a program on your computer or you press a sequence of buttons on the printer itself to begin the process. A number of these cleanings, in succession, will usually take care of a clogged head–but not always. I recently found my year and a half old Epson Stylus Color 600 unable to print coherently using black ink and no amount of standard cleaning-cycle runthroughs would fix the problem.<\/p>\n

On some inkjet printers (HP’s for instance) the ink cartridge contains the print head, so changing the cartridge gives you a new, unclogged printhead. My Epson’s print head is part of the printer itself, and can only be replaced by a service technician, and the cost is usually very close to the price of the printer itself. I had to come up with something better than that, so I began searching the web to see what people in similar predicaments had done. I found that I my problem was not unique and there were some rather successful remedies floating around. <\/p>\n

I discovered that isopropyl alcohol (I bought a bottle of 91% isopropyl alcohol at the drugstore) is a great solvent for this sort of dried ink. There were those that recommended that I take an old, discarded ink jet cartridge, open it, clean it out with the alcohol, fill it back up with alcohol, reseal it, and place it in the printer for a few runs through the printer’s self-cleaning method. This proved to be a rather messy endeavor indeed, so I followed a bit of less-aggressive advice. <\/p>\n

I simply removed the black print cartridge from the printer and dropped 7-10 drops of alcohol down in the ink-receptacle area where the ink cartridge normally sits (there should be a little hole down in there where the ink actually flows from the cartridge into the head), replaced the ink cartridge, and ran a few sessions of the printers head-cleaning routine. It took quite a few cleaning sessions (probably 15-20) with a few pages of text prints thrown in there just to try and move some ink, before it cleared up. <\/p>\n

It actually had to sit overnight, with the last few cleanings done the next morning, before all was well — but well it is. Everything works perfectly now, and I don’t have to go out and buy a new printer. <\/p>\n

To avoid such blockages, it’s a good idea to print something, both in color and black & white (if you’ve got a color printer), once a week or so just to keep things moving. But if you do end up cursed with a blocked print head — this method should take care of you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Subscribe How to Clean Clogged Inkjet Printheads by Blake W Patterson A clogged print head on your inkjet printer is not a fine thing. Over time (especially when there’s long periods of no printer use) the many tiny holes that make up a modern inkjet printer’s head can become clogged with dried ink. Most printers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-helpful-information"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tripinsurancestore.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tripinsurancestore.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tripinsurancestore.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tripinsurancestore.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tripinsurancestore.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tripinsurancestore.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tripinsurancestore.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tripinsurancestore.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tripinsurancestore.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}