Maintaining a thermal printer involves a number of different tasks. In this video, you’ll learn about thermal paper replacement, heating element cleaning, removing debris, and thermal paper sensitivity to heat.
If you’re using a thermal printer, you don’t have to worry about ink, and you don’t have to worry about toner, but you do have to worry about the paper that you’re using. The paper inside of a thermal printer is designed to work for thermal printers only. We can’t use paper from an inkjet printer or a laser printer inside of a thermal printer.
There are also a lot of different sizes of thermal paper. That’s probably because there are a lot of different sizes of thermal printers. You’ll want to make sure that the thermal paper that you’re using is specifically designed for the make and model of the printer that you’re using.
Fortunately, the process of replacing thermal paper is relatively straightforward, and on most thermal printers, you can perform this process in less than a minute. Here’s how easy it is. We’ll add a new roll of thermal paper to this printer. We’ll extend the paper to the outside of the printer, and close the top of the printer on top of it. We’ll then push it down to lock it in place. And now we have a new roll of paper to use for our next print job.
There might also be times when the heating element of your thermal printer needs to be cleaned. On most thermal printers, the heating element is usually easy to get to, and it’s relatively easy to clean. We’ll often use IPA, or isopropyl alcohol, to clean off the heating element without damaging the element itself. There are also cleaning pens that have IPA that make it easy to put the IPA in the exact place and quickly move it back and forth to clean off that heating element.
Different manufacturers have different recommendations for how the heating element should be cleaned. And in every case, you should always check your documentation. There are also very sensitive components inside of these printers, so you want to be very careful when you’re swabbing and cleaning off that heating element.
You might also find a cleaning cart. This is very similar to sending paper through the printer. But instead, the cleaning card is cleaning the pathways, and ultimately, cleaning the heating element of the printer as well.
On any printer that you use, over time, you’ll start to get pieces of debris or parts of the page that are little fine pieces of dust that are inside of the printer. You will occasionally need to clean those out of the printer to keep everything working properly. If you’re working on a thermal printer that’s relatively portable, you can take that outside and use some type of air supply to blow out the inside of the printer to remove all of that debris. If you’re not able to move the printer, you may be able to wipe off the inside with a damp cloth.
In most cases, you would probably want to avoid using a vacuum. Any time you use a traditional vacuum with a lot of dust, it tends to create static electricity. And as we know, static electricity is the enemy of our electronic components. Some organizations have specially made vacuums specifically for working with sensitive electronic components. So if you have one of those computer or printer vacuums, you might want to consider using that to clean out your printer.
As the name implies, a thermal printer is using heat to be able to create the output that we see on the printed page. If another heat source was to come in contact with this page, it would also change the colors on the page. So you want to be very careful about avoiding any hot areas if you have any output from a thermal printer. You would not want to put your printed thermal output or label anywhere near a car dashboard, on a radiator, or anywhere near a hairdryer. If you do, the page itself will begin to turn dark, and eventually, you won’t be able to read any part of it at all.
Also, keep in mind that thermal paper tends to fade over time. So if you have a receipt or some other type of output from a thermal printer, and you need to reference that receipt a year from now, you might want to have an additional copy printed on a type of page that is able to be archived. Or you might want to take a digital image of that receipt so that later on you know that you’ll be able to go back and reference the information that was on that page, even if the original tends to fade over time.