These same printers are often neglected and go without proper routine maintenance. Contaminants including dirt, dust, air pollution, pollen, oil and grease get inside the printer and contaminate the print head and platen roller.
With regular routine preventative maintenance you can assure that your thermal printers will provide satisfactory results and extend the life of the printer. Almost everyone has seen the results of a bad thermal print job: streaked or faded receipt, shipping labels that have poor barcodes, and print that is difficult to read. These are problems associated with dirty print heads.
How a Thermal Printer works:
A thermal printer (or direct thermal printer) produces a printed image by selectively heating coated thermochromic paper, or thermal paper as it is commonly known, when the paper passes over the thermal print head. The coating turns black in the areas where it is heated, producing an image.1
The thermal printers mechanism includes a thermal printing head which uses heat to print on the paper and a platen, usually a rubber roller, that feeds and presses the paper against the printhead through the use of springs that exert pressure on the platen roller.
When the print head and platen roller become dirty or contaminated the heat cannot be properly conducted to the print medium. If the heat is not conducted properly poor print quality is the result. Poor print quality includes prints that appear faded (this is usually and incorrectly blamed on the paper or label stock); prints that have streaks or are missing printed areas and/or banding.
So the question is what type of preventative maintenance and cleaning should be done with thermal printers?
A simple preventative maintenance plan can be implemented cost effectively through the regular use of
cleaning cards, cleaning pens, wipes and snap swabs.
Cleaning cards are cards that come pre-saturated with cleaning fluid to remove contaminants from the print head and platen roller. These are by far the easiest products to use. It is recommended that every time you change the paper or label roll a cleaning card should be sent through the printer. And, only Waffletechnology cleaning cards can actually turn the platen roller as it cleans to provide the most effective clean possible.
Cleaning pens are specially designed pens that come filled with cleaning solution (much like a felt tip marker) that is used directly on the print head. To use the pens you have to have direct access to the print head. Cleaning pens are often used on thermal printers used for label printing as they work well to remove label residue.
Cleaning wipes are similar to pens but instead of a pen the cleaning fluid is on a cleaning cloth material. The cloth is manually wiped on the print head and platen roller.
For really stubborn areas a snap swab can be used. The snap swab has a special tip and a reservoir of cleaning fluid. A snap of the reservoir releases the fluid into the cleaning tip that is then applied to the print head and platen roller.
For more information on Thermal Printhead Cleaning Pens go to:
Why use Cleaning Cards, Wipes & Swabs?
Regular preventative maintenance prolongs equipment life and reduces capital expenditures
Maintenance fees are reduced
Reduce equipment downtime
Reduce processing costs from erroneous transactions
Customer loyalty increases with fast efficient transactions
Cleaning prolongs equipment life and reduces capital expenditures. Probably the easiest way to quickly clean equipment is with a cleaning card. Cleaning cards have proven that when used regularly they will save your organization money. For example: An airline thought they needed to replace 200 thermal printers that were not performing properly. The replacement cost of the thermal printers was quoted at $200,000. The airline looked for an alternative to see if they could save money so they tried a test and purchased $300.00 in
cleaning cards to see if the print heads could be cleaned and fix the problem. The cleaning cards worked and all 200 printers are still in service; this same airline is now a regular user of cleaning cards.
Cleaning Cards help reduce maintenance fees and downtime.
Cleaning cards are the fastest, lowest cost maintenance around. It is like having a maintenance man on your shelf. If a thermal printer begins failing take out a cleaning card and run it through the device. 80% of the time the problem is resolved with this simple procedure eliminating the need to place a maintenance call and remove equipment from operation. That may mean increased sales, faster transaction processing or the ability to ship a package on-time with a clearly printed label.
Cleaning cards reduce equipment downtime.
Why wait for a maintenance person to come to your location and diagnose the problem? Or wait while maintenance takes your printer away to the shop to be repaired or a new one to be delivered and installed? The printer can often be back in service in seconds with a cleaning card. Most equipment failures are caused by dirt and only needs to be removed to be fully functional again.
Cleaning cards reduce costs associated from erroneous transactions.
Ever have your luggage not arrive with you on the plane? How about a shipment going to the wrong address or delayed because the label could not be read? How about a barcode scanner not being able to read a printed barcode? Or customers want to return merchandise but their receipt is not legible? Costs associated from these transactions can be avoided. Costs from extra labor to manually key in data that could have been read with a clear barcode; costs in re-routing packages; costs in time spent on customer service trying to read a receipt (not to mention unhappy customers in the queue). These are all costs that can be drastically reduced if not eliminated with a simple routine cleaning.
