Can someone tell me the maintenance routine of a Cadet?

[Robert Lambie]

if you are planning to leave the machine idle for 2 to 3 days, it is recomended that you do a light maintenance clean. we do this on a friday night before closing for the weekend.
the complete process takes a max of about 5 minutes. its not messy and its not hard.

if you plan shutting the machine down for more than 4 days, i.e. going on holiday, you will need to do a flush. this involves putting 4 flush carts into the machine, selecting a program and the machine does the rest.

we have had our grenadier over two years now. i have never flushed because i basically popped into the work during christmas, run a couple of test prints, done the light maintenance clean and that was that… total time about 15 minutes. saved me any flush proceedure.

[Peter Shaw]

I slightly disagree with Robert.

For a short term shut down, say 4-14 days, leaving the heads soaking should suffice. This can be nuisance in that the differential pressure in the 4 ink cartridges causes ink to be sucked from one line to another. It then has to be cleared which can waste a lot of ink. I have found that if you replace the ink cartridges with empty ones, this problem does not occur and the soak works OK.

For longer term shut down you will need to flush. This is quite expensive in wasted ink and flush cartridges.

I also tried another method last Easter shutdown of running a small print each day from home by connecting to my office machine via Logmein.com. That worked fine too.

Peter

[Jon Stephens]

How did you turn the printer on via remote control ?

Jon 🙂

[Peter Shaw]

Logmein.com is a site that allows you to take control of another computer. I use this to access work machines from home and vice-versa. It links via an email address to computers which have the logmein.com software loaded and for which the passwords are known. When logged on your screen becomes the screen of the remote machine. Its very useful, performs very well and is free for this function.

The Cadet was left with material loaded. I then accessed the computer which we use to control the Cadet and simply printed via the RIP.

Checkout http://www.logmein.com

Peter

[Stephen Morriss]

Try this method this method for remote printing.

If the computer is connected to the Internet and has email using outlook or outlook express then setup a folder called print, you can then set the properties for this folder to automatically print to the default printer.

Then make a rule so that any email with a certain address or text gets moved to the folder.

This will then print the email so just embed an image of CMYK colour blocks.

Make sure you test it using the email method you’ll use on the shutdown.

Steve

[Phill Fenton]

A couple of concerns I would have if printing remotely:

Make sure none of the ink cartridges are about to run out – if any do then the printer will shut down awaiting a change of ink cartidge. (If printing remotely you will not be aware that this has happened or would you?)

The other concern I would have is if the printer has gone into sleep mode – will it start up and do a print when a file is sent from the PC? – or does someone have to be there to press the on switch to take the printer out of sleep mode?

[Peter Normington]

Ultra vnc is a good remote program to use its free and you dont get any junk emails after downloading it You can remotely connect to any computer that is running vnc,I found it better than windows remote desktop.

Peter

[Jon Stephens]

Am I right in saying that you can leave the printer turned on, sleep setting off, heaters off, and just remote control the PC to print a job ?

[Stephen Morriss]

The printer wakes up from sleep mode, waits until the heaters are upto temp and then prints and shuts down again after the specified time, you don’t have to wake it up, this is how I print normally if I’ve left the media in.

You could turn the heaters off though as you don’t need them for a print that’s getting thrown away.

The only concern I would have with this is if you get a head strike of like Phill says the ink runs out.
The head strike you could almost guarantee against by adding some weight to the media’s front edge and making sure the test print is not long and the inks are no problem if their near full anyway.

Steve