There are a lot of solvents and solutions being sold today for cleaning inkjet cartridges and print heads. The types of solutions are as varied as the bottles they come in. Some are nothing more than water with a glycol base added, nothing more than anti-freeze. Other solutions look just like plain ordinary water. I've got one on the shelf next to me that came from a prominent ink vendor that I'll bet if I had it analyzed the result would be this: Active Ingredients - H2O.
Have you ever been told that Windex (A popular glass cleaner in the US also popular in the UK is Windolene) works great for dissolving dried ink? Well if you haven't heard it before I am telling you now. However, it is not the "Magic Solution", but it's close.
What is Windex? It's water, ammonia and some blue food coloring for the most part. The magic is in the ammonia!
Ammonia is pretty nasty stuff. It can almost bring you back from a coma just by smelling it and it's the main ingredient in smelling salts. Not oddly enough ammonia is used as a reactive agent in many invisible ink formulas. As a side note, never mix ammonia with bleach. It will produce chlorine gas, a very dangerous substance used in World War I as a chemical weapon. Ever heard of mustard gas?
Ok, enough with the chemistry lesson. What I'm saying is even though ammonia is great for dissolving ink please be careful when using it.
Most of the toughest clogs can be fixed by soaking the print head in a bowl of a 50/50% solution of ammonia and water overnight. If that doesn't work you can soak it in pure ammonia for up to 1 hour then a 100% water rinse.
If your print head is not removable you can inject a diluted ammonia mix (10% ammonia and 90% de-ionized water, or just use Windex) into an empty cartridge and run print head cleanings to get the solution into the print head. If the clog does not open leave the printer sit overnight and try it again the next day. Many times the clog will release overnight as the ammonia solution goes to work.
Some people will tell you to use alcohol to unclog cartridges and print heads. While it may work for a short while the alcohol will actually increase the chances of another clog. This is because the alcohol will tend to dry out the plastics and metals in the head. Alcohol will only fix very mild clogs that could probably be fixed with an aggressive print head cleaning. If you want to do the job right use the ammonia solutions as I discussed above.
Having Fun With The Printer Support Techs
Many years ago when I was a copier technician my boss would always tell us to push our companies supplies, paper, toner etc.. Of course they wanted to sell more supplies and make more money but their techniques were very questionable. Just like printers you could go out and purchase generic supplies and some worked better than others naturally. Well the supplies that we sold were also mostly generic, however, they were branded with our companies name and logos. Here's where the sneakiness comes in. When a customer complained about a repair cost estimate we were told to blame it on their inferior generic supplies and to further that the repair would have been much cheaper if they were using our over-priced supplies.
My Printer Died - An Epitaph
My printer just died. My Epson C60 that I've had for almost 2 years was my buddy. I loved that printer. It was there for me through thick and thin. Sure it had it's quirks and idiosyncrasies like not printing when my office temperature dropped to 17 degrees because I forgot to turn the thermostat up one bitterly cold morning. I had to open the lid and point a ceramic space heater inside to thaw it out.
When Is Black Not Black?
Did you notice how many different black inks there are available? At last count we have forty different black inks listed on our web site. You may be wondering how many shades of black can there be? Well there are actually different shades of black which I will explain in a bit.
