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 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 run-throughs would fix the problem.
On some inkjet printers (HP's for instance) the ink
cartridge contains the print head, so changing the cartridge
gives you a new, unclogged print head. 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 my problem was not unique and there were some rather
successful remedies floating around.
I discovered that isopropyl alcohol (I bought a bottle of
91% alcohol at the drugstore for ~$3) 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.
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.
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.
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.
