A little Fairy Story or is it !...

[PeterBJ]

Isopropyl alcohol is not expensive and available at many places. Propylene glycol is used in smoking liquid for E-cigarettes and in some cosmetics, I bought it from an on line cosmetics company. Maybe the propylene glycol could be substituted by glycerine for the print head conservation fluid? Your comments please @pharmacist .

 

[Emulator]

Can you use Fairy Liquid solution for purging your cartridges?

 

[The Hat]

That’s what I intend using any time I need to purge instead of just using plain fresh water, you will have to give it a good rinse afterwards dough, it affect pigment ink more so if not rinsed properly.

Lidl W5 washing-up liquid is just as good, it doesn’t have to be any particular brand name.
Edit : Up-date in the US this stuff is called Dawn..

 

[Smile]

Very interesting story, has anyone else had good results with this fairy liquid?
Perhaps soaking for a week is not needed? Anyone tried to do tests with time intervals like few days etc?

 

[mikling]

One key aspect to this soaking is that the INLETS were covered with liquid. This aspect has never really been reviewed but this is important. I will cover this on another thread down the road. I realized this quite recently with my Pro9000 printhead and why partial clogs occur after a period of no printing.

 

[Smile]

I would suggest to make simple bird water feeder device so you would fill a bottle with this liquid and the nozzles would always be wet, liquid would evaporate but keep constant level.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTVyRW55L4o

just replace the plate with some container.

 

[PeterBJ]

One key aspect to this soaking is that the INLETS were covered with liquid. This aspect has never really been reviewed but this is important. I will cover this on another thread down the road. I realized this quite recently with my Pro9000 printhead and why partial clogs occur after a period of no printing.

I look forward to the new thread.

 

[PeterBJ]

I have successfully unclogged an HP300 black cartridge, that was totally clogged and had a dried sponge, using the Fairy dish washing liquid. HP300 is a European type designation; the same cartridge is known as HP60 in the US.

I removed the top from the cartridge and removed the sponge. The cartridge body could now be treated like you would treat a clogged Canon print head.

I put a kitchen sponge at the bottom of a small tray and filled it with around 200ml of hot tap water, with maybe 1ml of Fairy liquid added. I also filled some of the mixture into the cartridge and placed it on the sponge and left it for half an hour. I then pumped the cartridge up and down, like unclogging a miniature drain. This cleaned the clogged nozzles. I then flushed the cartridge under running hot tap water both inside and outside.

I wiped it dry and filled a few millimetres of KMP-U pigment black ink into the Ink chamber and used a paper handkerchief to wick out the Fairy mixture from the nozzles and replace it with ink and in doing so priming the nozzles.

I had also washed the sponge and dried it. I filled the ink chamber in the cartridge to half height and put the sponge back in place and put the top back onto the cartridge and secured it in place using Scotch "Magic" tape. The cartridge worked immediately after putting it back in the printer.

As there is no such thing as a standardized clog, I cannot tell if the Fairy solution is more or less efficient in unclogging, than pharmacist's solution and window cleaners with ammonia, but my experience indicates it actually works.

I found it hard to believe that dish washing liquid would be any good as a print head cleaner, but instead of dismissing the idea, I decided to give it a try.