If you deal with edible ink printers at all, you’ll know that they require some serious maintenance as far as cleaning them goes, and that at some point, your edible ink printer won’t print at all..
I had three printers in use at all times when I was selling printed wafer paper, and I ended up cleaning the print heads about once every two weeks or so. Sometimes they only work for a couple of days before they’ll stop printing a specific color.
The worst is when you clean them, it doesn’t work, you clean them again and it still doesn’t work, and you get to the point where you have to throw the printer out. This is something to try before you get to that point.
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What to do first.
First of all, try cleaning the print head the normal way. The two options I’m going to tell you about further along are seriously last-ditch attempts to save the print head, but it could also ruin them if you’re not careful!
Watch this video for the basic way to clean a print head:
Understanding why the desperate methods could work.
The edible ink that goes through the print heads will clog them up because they don’t have the chemicals in them that make the ink flow through smoothly.
Food coloring ink can clog up the print head and it can gum everything up to the point where you have to give up.
I’d been having a lot of trouble with my printers at one point because of a problem with the ink, and even after that was fixed I think I had lingering clogs that just weren’t flushed out when I cleaned the print head.
I had a printer that’d only been in use for a month, but that wouldn’t print after a few cleanings, so I decided to do a couple of things that I probably shouldn’t do.
(You need to decide for yourself whether you’re willing to try these things, because if you do it wrong it can ruin the printer. I figured that if it wasn’t printing it couldn’t get worse, so I went ahead with trying them.)
Option 1: Take the print head apart.
The first option is to unscrew the teeny little screws that hold the plate on the bottom of the print head to the body of it.
You need to be really careful with this because the film that connects the two pieces has electronics on it, or it looks like it does, anyway.
I unscrewed the plate, then carefully worked the two pieces apart, and that let me see the little holes where the ink comes out of the cartridges on the inside of the print head.
I was able to clean out the inside, and blast some hot water through the holes to release some of the clogged ink once I had access to the holes there.
When everything was running through clean, I reattached the plate to the print head after drying everything off carefully with a paper towel, and tested the print head in the printer.
This did work for a couple of days, but then it clogged up again!
I must have missed a clog that was lurking around in there, so I decided to try the next thing.
Option 2: Put the print head in the dishwasher.
Yes, I put the print head in the dishwasher.
I’ll say that this was my home dishwasher, not a commercial one, and I put it in the top section in the basket that’s the farthest away from the heating element.
Even then, the water in a dishwasher gets a lot hotter than the water from the tap, so I figured that it might dissolve anything that was left in the print head.
When it was done, I took it out and let it dry out, and it worked!
I’ll see how long it stays free-flowing, but as a desperation move it was effective.
Which is the best method?
In the future, I’ll be using the regular cleaning methods first (I just did another printer cleaning on a different printer and I did it the regular way,) but if I had to choose one of the above methods, I’d do the dishwasher one.
The reason for that is that it avoids messing with the inside of the print head, and it did clean everything out really well.
I would run the print head under hot water to start, then I’d put it in the dishwasher and run it with a regular load of dishes.
I don’t recommend doing this on a regular basis, and you shouldn’t add other things to the dishwasher like the rinse agents that keep your glassware spot-free, but regular detergent is fine.
If you’re desperate and one step away from trashing the printer, though, it can’t hurt to see if it works!
Wafer paper supply list:
Shop for materials to make wafer paper flowers on Amazon (#ad):
- Wafer paper, white or colored
- Silicone flower center molds
- Petal veiners
- Petal dust
- Floral wire
- Tylose glue
- Fluffy paintbrushes
- Flower former
- Craft scissors
- Liquid Food Coloring
- Food-grade glycerin to make wafer paper conditioner
- Corn starch
- Flower paper punches
- Steamer to shape wafer paper
