Kitchen Cleaning Tips That Work On Your Inkjet Desktop Printer - Great advice for extending your Printer cartridge life!

If you think of your ink-jet desktop printer as a kitchen appliance, you might find cleaning and maintaining it a bit easier to understand. While some people have no problem pulling storage bins off kitchen shelves and removing them, pulling storage bins off kitchen shelves and removing them, these same people cringe at the thought of removing an inkjet cartridge, wiping down the cartridge heads and replacing it in the printers. If you think about it, these maintaining are repairing printers seems to put up a barrier that's hard for many people to break through. However, if these barriers can be broken down, many people find that taking care of a printer is not too complicated and even extends the life of the printers.

Don't think you need a mechanical license to troubleshoot problems on a desktop printer. Many desktop printers are designed to fix themselves. For instance, printers do a diagnostic testing and quick cleaning every time you turn on the printer. A few other helpful tips to keep your kitchen appliance - oops, desktop printer - operating in tiptop condition are as follows:

~ Do let toaster oven crumbs collect in the oven forever? Emptying the toaster tray clears away these crumbs just like wiping built up ink off the printer cartridge head with a clean dry cloth. Ink dries and clogs the cartridge head the longer that a cartridge sits unused. Also, a long cleaning cycle will correct this problem so that the ink flows more evenly.

~ Goodies on baking pans can drip onto the oven floor. These drippings need to be cleaned up just like scraps left behind in a paper jam. Opening the slot in the back of the desktop printer allows you to pull out these scraps so that the paper feed works correctly and the rollers can operate right.

~ Foreign objects can also jam up the printer. These jams sound just like spoon falling into a dough blender. If you don't turn off the printer and remove these objects in time, repairs on the printer may be pointless. Again, open the back slot area to remove these objects. More often than not, the culprits are paper clips or pen caps that have mysteriously worked their way into the sliding cartridge area.

~ Kneading bread pushes out excess air. Cartridge ink also needs to be burped once and while to loosen air stuck in settled ink. One way to do this is by lifting the cartridge lock up and down. Another way is to remove the cartridge, turn it upside down and couple times, and putting it back in place.

~ Dust likes to gather on kitchen splash boards. The inside of a desktop printer also seems to attract lots of dust from the paper tray. The problem with paper dust is it can gum up operations. Light vacuuming or compressed air easily fixes this problem. Just don't let the vacuum hose touch printer components. Window cleaners like Windex can also be used to lightly wipe away dust off the paper tray.

~ If you do discover that the repairs are beyond your ability, you can always call the toll free help line number that comes along with your desktop inkjet printer or take your printer into a repair center. In many cases, you may find that the cost for repairs is not worth your money and time in comparison to purchasing a new desktop inkjet printer.

~ If you're a very ambitious cleaner, you can purchase special desktop printer cleaning kits from the manufacturer and a retailer. Most of these kits contain cleaning components designed for ink-jet printers such as cleaning sheets, compressed air, foam tipped buds and solvent cleaning fluid.

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Charly Delmont is the webmaster of Ready Printer which is the #1 resource of information about printers on the Internet. For more details visit her archive of articles here: http://www.readyprinter.com

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