You may need to leave your office for a long period of time during this event and here are some tips and tricks on keeping your office asset healthy until it’s back to business as usual:
If you plan to leave your HP DesignJet or DesignJet XL Printer for a more than two weeks, it’s best to leave it on. All HP DesignJet and DesignJet XL 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 you do get back to printing, here are some tips to keep the HP DesignJet and DesignJet XL in top shape:
Run the printhead cleaning from the front panel before your first print run or if you see white banding or a “replace printhead” messages. If the printer has been idle for a while, you might need to 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.
Later HP DesignJet and DesignJet XL models have made it convenient with a touch of a button on the front panel to do the 4 most common calibrations and in proper order. Make sure to have the paper you plan to use loaded as it will be needed for some of the calibrations. These calibrations are done automatically, so you can do other things while the printer optimizes itself.