Cleaning your inkjet printheads

Cleaning your inkjet printheads

The printhead nozzles on your printer can become blocked with dried ink which will cause various problems when printing from streaking of the ink and colour bands to being unable to print at all. You can usually run a nozzle check in your printer utility program that was supplied with your printer. This will print out a sample to check for ink clogging, just follow the instructions in the relevant part of the utility.

To clear small ink blockages, run the cleaning function in the printer utility, the printhead cleaning utility is usually in the maintenance section of the printer utility. As long as the printhead blockage is not too bad, the cleaning cycle should be able to fix the problem. The cycle may need to be run more than once but it is best to keep it to less then three times in a row.

Certain makes of inkjet printer, e.g. Hewlett Packard, have the printhead included in the ink cartridge so when you replace the cartridge, you get a fresh, unblocked printhead included with the new cartridge. On some other printers, including Canon printers, the ink cartridges sit in the printhead, the printhead can be taken out of the printer and replaced but new printheads can be expensive, sometimes more expensive than buying a new printer.

The best way to avoid the problem of clogged printheads is to keep the ink from drying out too often, this is best achieved by printing at least once a week making sure that all the cartridges are used, whether black or colour cartridges. If you have no need to use the printer regularly, remember to print out a sample page once a week using all cartridges in the printer, just to keep the ink moving through the printheads. Running the cleaning cycle uses up ink and printing a page a week should help your ink cartridges to last longer than letting the printheads dry out and having to run the cleaning cycle repeatedly.