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PIXMA PRO-100 needs print head cleaning every week

Penningtonsm
Apprentice

Can anyone help me understand why I have to clean my printer head every week? I clean the head, make a beautiful print, then two weeks later I want to make another print and half the colors don’t print out. I’m wasting so much ink and photo paper constantly having to clean the printer head. It’s so frustrating! Please please please help me.

5 REPLIES 5

jrhoffman75
Legend
Legend

Give Canon a call at (866) 261-9362. 

John Hoffman
Conway, NH

1D X Mark III, M200, Many lenses, Pixma PRO-100, Pixma TR8620a, Lr Classic

TCampbell
Elite
Elite

Are you powering your printer off when it is not being used?

 

If yes, then that may be the problem.

 

The printer has a self-timer that knows how long it has been since the last cleaning cycle.  If left on 24x7x365 it will periodically run a very light version of a self-cleaning cycle just to get anything in the nozzle purged out before it clog.  This uses just a few drops of ink.  

 

If the printer is powered down, the self-cleaning timer doesn't run (there's no internal battery, etc.) and the printer has no idea how long it's been since the last cleaning -- and I'm told this results in it wanting to do a more aggressive version of the self-cleaning cycle and that does use quite a bit more ink.

 

I leave my printer powerd on all the time.  Once every few days I'll hear it wake up and do it's thing... then go back to sleep.  But it seems to take a long time to empty a tank doing this (it's not much ink).  I pretty much only use my printer for photo printng, so the non-photo tanks (such as matte black) almost never get touched.  I use them as a mearsure of how quickly the self-cleaning cycles go through ink.  My printer is a Pro-10 and uses pigment based ink (the Pro-100 uses dye-based ink).  Pigment ink dries faster than dye ink ... so pigment printers need more frequent cleaning.  I think the Pro-100 waits twice as long as the Pro-10 before it self-cleans.  But even with the more frequent cleaning... my guess is it would take around a year to empty a tank via the self-cleaning method.

 

 

Tim Campbell
5D III, 5D IV, 60Da

Penningtonsm
Apprentice
I have never turned my printer off since I received it.

Give Canon a call at 1-800-OK-CANON.

John Hoffman
Conway, NH

1D X Mark III, M200, Many lenses, Pixma PRO-100, Pixma TR8620a, Lr Classic


@Penningtonsm wrote:
I have never turned my printer off since I received it.

In that case, you should call Canon.  The periodic automatic cleaning should be taking care of it but it doesn't sound like that's happening.

 

Tim Campbell
5D III, 5D IV, 60Da
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