When Do I Need to Replace My Printhead?
If you have a commercial printer for your business, cleaning and maintaining the printhead is important—after all, your printer won’t work if the printhead is broken or clogged. Even with proper care and maintenance, prinheads will sometimes need to be replaced. But how do you know when to replace a printhead?
Understanding Printheads
Even the most inexpensive inkjet printer has a printhead. If a printhead breaks on a home printer, it’s usually more economical to simply buy a new printer. With expensive commercial printers, it’s cost-prohibitive to buy a new printer whenever the printhead is broken, which is why it’s replaced instead.
Printheads are fed ink from cartridges or ink tanks (bulk ink systems); this ink is sprayed onto the paper with tiny nozzles. Piezo inkjet printheads use electric charges and vibrations to push ink out of the nozzles, while thermal inkjet printheads use heat to boil the ink and produce ink vapour, which is forced through the nozzle of the printhead.
As you can imagine, with different types of printheads, there are different ways to clean and repair them, and different answers to the question of when they should be replaced. Typically a print head would need to be replaced if it is severely clogged or has sustained electronic damage. As a result, the printer can no longer produce good prints.
Signs That You Need to Replace Your Printhead
If you notice a loss in print quality, it may be a sign that you need to replace a printhead. It may also just be a sign that your printhead needs to be cleaned. How do you know which is needed?
It’s simple: clean the printhead first. Your printing system could just be clogged and in need of a good thorough cleaning. Try using the correct cleaning fluid to unclog your printhead. Run one or two cleaning cycles to clear out any dried ink. If you’ve done that and you’re still not seeing an improvement, the next step is probably to check if you have ink in your ink lines, dampers and tanks. These two steps should resolve most printhead problems, but if they don’t, it’s likely time to replace your printhead.
Purchasing a New Printhead Replacement
Contact the Perfect Laser support team first to get a technician to assist you with troubleshooting. In some cases an assessment will be required to be certain the printhead needs to be replaced and as such our technicians carry all necessary parts and the client is required to do an immediate payment before our tech installs the new head. Callout fees however need to be paid upfront.
