How to Avoid Edible Printing Nightmares Through a Simple Routine (includes print-out)
Tell us if you’ve had this situation: Printer stops working, or prints badly, late at night for a last minute order for the next morning right?! Argh! We know the feeling…
We learned the hard way – but the reality is that many of these problems could be avoided, reducing the chance of:
- Blotchy icing images
- Faded lines
- Loss of colours (despite full tank)
- Even completely blank prints
How? Drum roll please…
…through a regular maintenance schedule.
Wow, ok so that was a bit of an anti-climax.
But although it’s not exciting, from experience the benefits pay off many times over from a routine of regular maintenance- both through extending the life of your edible printing equipment, and avoiding that late night stress and panic when you’re printer’s seized up!
Now maintenance is nothing new. “Make sure to clean the print heads regularly” – your supplier will say. However inevitably maintenance ends up being more on a troubleshooting basis, when something’s already gone wrong (because we’d always prefer to spend the time doing something else, right?!).
So below we’ve given a timeline of how often you should check your equipment based on our experience, including when you should be replacing. This means you are always getting very high quality prints, and reducing your printing issues.
A quick caveat: This is a rule of thumb – if you miss a week or two it isn’t going to have any noticeable effect in the short term, it is more important to simply have a regular maintenance routine. If you are printing very regularly (eg 20+ prints every day), you will need to shorten some of these timescales. And let us know if you have any suggestions to add to the schedule based on your personal experience!
Feel free to share this to your friends in need using the relevant buttons above, or you can also download a PDF version here to print out.
So what thoughts do you have on the above? Could this schedule help you?
