Help your customers ensure that all of their HP DesignJet printers stay healthy during extended periods of little or no usage.
Your customers may need to leave their offices for long periods of time or they may need to scale back the number of printers that they are actively using on a regular (daily) basis. During this period of inactivity you will want to ensure to keep their office assets healthy until it’s time to return active business usage.
If a HP DesignJet Printer will not be used for multiple weeks, it is still best to leave it on. All HP DesignJet Printers are made to enter sleep mode when not in use after a certain period of time. This sleep mode is designed to conserve power, reduce mechanical wear, and keep the ink system from drying up. Every 24 hours your printer will wake up and check the printheads to ensure that they are operational and then go back to sleep. There are stories of printers in sleep mode for over 6 months waking up when a job is sent to it, and printing like a fine-tuned machine. It will consume a small amount of ink to keep the ink system fresh, but it is a tiny fraction of the price to replace just one printhead.
If the printer does need to be powered off for any reason: Keep the ink cartridges in place, unload the paper, and make sure to power off via the power button / front panel, to make sure that the ink system has been properly parked in place.
When it is time to get back to active business you should run the printhead cleaning routine from the front panel before your first print run. If you see white banding or get a “replace printhead” message you could run this procedure 2-4 times to clear the white banding. If you see no improvements, then it’s unrecoverable and it will be time to replace the printhead.
These details and more great information about this can be found in your DesignJet User’s Guide under “Move or store the printer”.
