Jim Rossman: Clogged inkjet printer? Run that cleaning cycle

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I got a call from a friend who was having trouble with his inkjet printer. He was going to be officiating a wedding and wanted to print out his notes, but the printer was not cooperating.

His Canon inkjet printer was spitting out streaky text that was unreadable.

He uses the printer only occasionally, and print quality was terrible. This is one of the main disadvantages of inkjet printing – if you don’t print regularly, eventually the ink nozzles will get clogged up with dried ink.

Think about the ink nozzles in your printer like your shower head at home. The nozzles are grids of tiny holes, and the ink has to be aimed precisely to get clear images and text.

What can you do to fix it? It seems odd to me, but the solution to clogged ink nozzles is to flush them out, and the only option is by blasting more ink through them.

The printer settings should include a maintenance section. On this Canon printer, the small touchscreen had a gear icon to access the settings. Inside the settings, I picked Maintenance and then Nozzle Check, which prints out a small grid using all the ink colors.

Once you see the nozzle grid, the printer screen will ask if there are any gaps in the grid. Gaps indicate spots where the nozzles are clogged. If you say yes, you have two options – cleaning or deep cleaning.

Your first option should be “Cleaning,” which floods the nozzles with fresh ink. Once the cleaning is finished, you’ll be presented the option to print the nozzle check again.

If there are still gaps in the grid, you can choose “Deep Cleaning” and the printer will force even more ink through the nozzles to clean them out.

I’ve seen really clogged nozzles that required five or six cleaning cycles to get all the nozzles cleared.

Just know that running these repeated cleaning cycles can use up a lot of ink, which can get expensive. My friend was crossing his fingers that he’d have enough ink left to print his notes (he did).