Yep, we have all been there. Your inkjet printer has been sitting on a shelf unused for months, or perhaps even only a few weeks. Then when you need to print out something essential, like your taxes or some sort of document that needs your immediate attention...
You add paper to the printer, turn it on and print your document just to find that it has streaks on the page or worse yet, is missing sections on the printed page!
It happened to me not too long ago. Except that it was a worse case scenario. I had sold something on E-bay and printed the shipping label. It "looked" like it was ok albeit very light, but when I brought the package to the Post Office to be scanned, the lady behind the counter couldn't scan it. "No problem" she said, as she commenced to punch the numbers into her hand-held scanner manually instead of using the bar code reader. Well 3-4 weeks later the purchaser complained that he never received the package. To my shock, the package was sitting at a downstream PO mail processing facility because it couldn't be scanned by the scanning equipment and, unlike my local post office, no one would scan it manually. Long story short (or is it too late!?), with the help of my local PO rep, it was tracked down to the processing center eventually and sent along it's merry way after several phone calls.
So now you are wondering why I am saying all this and how to solve the problem of dried out ink cartridges, or better yet how to prevent them from drying out at all no matter how long they sit around? Here is the secret....
Wrap & Suck Method: Take the ink cartridges out of your printer if you are not going to be using your printer for a while, wrap them tightly in plastic wrap, then put them in a vacuum seal bag like the one I used shown here. I then used a USB powered hand-held vacuum sealer (https://a.co/d/6uKojOE) to suck out all the air. Then when you need to print something, take them out, put them back in your printer and print away. When done, repeat the storage process.
These darn ink cartridges are so expensive, get dried out so quickly, and I am sick and tired of buying new ones when they cannot be "cleaned" by the printer in cleaning mode and yet are still full of ink. Oh, and 99% of the time you cannot clean them with a q-tip or with any other method that works reliably and consistently.
Try the "Wrap & Suck" method of preserving your ink cartridges yourself - IT WORKS!
