Tips

Too much humidity causes printer problems

Summer is upon us - and while we are still enjoying (?) 30 degree nights - we have had some spells of warm and moist weather in Vermont. In fact, we had a spell of moisture laden air come through last week that threw many of our printers for a loop! The humidity rose to 59% and we immediately experienced dropped nozzles and even entire dropped colors. This affected our new 7880s running UltraChrome inks as well as those running ConeColor inks.

On Thursday, we put the air-conditioners on trying to drive out some of the humidity. On Friday, we were still struggling to get below 55%. Over the weekend, we were able to dry out the studio to 51% relative humidity - quite close to our goal. This morning, the printers are back functioning normally.

Epson recommends an operating environment for humidity between 40 - 50%. Most of the problems our customers report are below 35% and above 60%. But keep in mind, that if everything has been going along just fine and suddenly you find yourself in a printer nightmare - check your environment. A small digital temperature/humidity gauge can be found at most garden stores for $25 and less. Certainly the costs of removing and adding moisture are considerably more expensive - but potentially well worth the costs in lost time and materials.

Temperature claims by Epson that it can operate up to 95 degrees is in my opinion, a little generous. Many of our customers complain about a number of problems in warm weather. Combining warm weather with humidity is the worst possible combination. It even affects the ability of paper to absorb ink at the same rate as more ideal operating environments.

Bulk ink maintenance

Epson recommends discarding an inkjet cart six months after its been inserted in a printer even if the cart is not empty. The reason Epson recommends this is mostly due to pigment settling. However, many of our customers are using endless ink supply systems such as the CIS system or ReUse carts. It is very important therefore, that you agitate the bottles of ink that are connected to the CIS system and remove and gently shake the large format ReUse carts. It is in your best interest to do this about every 3 weeks. All pigment ink has a tendency to settle. Both of these systems have a take up at the bottom of the bottle and cart that feeds ink to the printer. To avoid clogging dampers, make certain that you gently agitate your inks. And before you refill a bottle or ReUse cart, take the time to gently shake the bottle of ink that has been sitting on the shelf.

Tricks

Printing papers and lint

The single most complaint we hear about paper is related to lint. But the complaints vary from paper not feeding, to print heads "clogging", to specks of white suddenly appearing on finished prints. Fine art papers which are very popular with our customers come from mills which produce the sheets and rolls using old world technology. The paper is mostly made from cotton linters which have been beaten into tiny little fibers to form a slurry that is eventually formed into paper. The paper is finished into master rolls and eventually coated and sheeted or converted into smaller rolls. Lint is produced in any one of these operations and often finds its way onto the surface of the finished product.

Lint forms on the rubber take up rollers of Epson printers prohibiting some papers from auto-loading. This can be cleaned off by hand, but I use a double sided tape which has the same adhesive as post-it note. The product is called 3M 9415PC Double-Sided Removable Tape - 1" x 72 yards. I affix a length of this double-sided low tack tape to a thin but sturdy sheet of 8.5" x 11" paper so that it lines up with roller and feed it through. Feeding it through is not as straight forward as it sounds. The roller is going to grab this tape and will require some manual pulling on your part to get it through the printer. Sometimes it takes 2-4 successive paper loads to bring it all the way through. But the end result is a roller that will voraciously cling to the next sheet of fine art paper that it encounters. We need to do this usually every 25 sheets or so to restore the roller. ULINE carries this product.

Eco-Facts

An ocean of plastic

Drowning in plastic: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is twice the size of France
There are now 46,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometer of the world's oceans, killing a million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals each year. Worse still, there seems to be nothing we can do to clean it up. So how do we turn the tide?

"Way out in the Pacific Ocean, in an area once known as the doldrums, an enormous, accidental monument to modern society has formed. Invisible to satellites, poorly understood by scientists and perhaps twice the size of France, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not a solid mass, as is sometimes imagined, but a kind of marine soup whose main ingredient is floating plastic debris." read the entire news story from the UK Telegraph here.

Thanks to Rick Colson* for pointing out that alarming news story.

We are promoting ConeColor inks in ReUsable carts in an effort to help inkjet users refrain from discarding one-time-use plastic carts. It sometimes takes a news story like the one above to put this in perspective. But did you realize that:

• in the USA there are over 100 million inkjet printers in use today with 100 million more being sold annually, and each of these printers uses on average more than 10 cartridges a year.

• 2.5 ounces of oil are used to manufacture one small inkjet cart, and more than a quart are used to manufacture a large-format cart.

• each cart will take more than 10 centuries to decompose, while the inks remaining (up to 10%) in them begin to leak and filter into our water supply.

• more than 37 million carts a month are thrown away into landfill, and some are incinerated as part of an OEM's "recycling" program.

This is just a tremendous waste of resources which can be remedied by reusing the cart. But designing a cart to be re-used is not in the best interests of the OEM because it opens up the ink market to third parties. In fact, Epson recently (January, 2009) used the International Trade Commission to prevent the entry of cleaned and refilled original Epson carts into the USA from China. China's combination of low living costs and technological know-how make it the only country which can suitably clean and refill cartridges. Now that last option of ReUse is removed from the American consumer.

For large format ink users we can offer a ReUse cart which can be endlessly refilled and by doing so, save the user more than 65% of their ink costs and help protect the environment.

You can save 15% with the TRYME15 code on any of our starter kits. Click here to go to the ConeColor ordering page on our web site. Use the coupon code in the final checkout of the shopping cart.

I hope you liked my first Tips, Tricks and Eco-Facts newsletter.

Happy Printing!

Jon Cone
InkjetMall.com