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Everything old is new again, mark II . . . . .

Just when you think it’s safe to get back in the water! All of a sudden, deja vu! The problem I speak of is not one you’d quickly diagnose over the phone, but the cause is instantly recognisable once you have laid eyes on it. We haven’t really seen a lot of this since the blocked ozone filters on the old SX printer (the one a lot of us cut our teeth on and made much profit from).
In this case we’ll focus on the HP 2100 printer. As with most customers, you won’t get the full story up front, mostly because they are not aware of it themselves.
The initial complaint will be to tell you that your cartridge is dumping large amounts of toner onto the page and into the printer. The pages are coming out with a wispy, cobwebby mess of toner on them. (see photo 1 of pages retrieved from the customers rubbish).

After halving the cartridge, we found that there was a large build up of toner on the retainer blade side of the mag roller (see photo 2). This was not a split hopper cartridge, so what could be causing this? After removing the mag roller we found that there was nothing blocking the retainer blade.
In fact the cause for the toner build up was the doctor blade (see photo 3). That’s right, check out how soft and out of spec the neoprene had become.
A thorough check of the printer revealed a blocked fan guard (see photo 4). Lack of air flow meant that the printer was staying hot for much longer periods after printing and this was probably the case for its stand-by mode also. After questioning the customer further, we found that they had a dirt driveway right outside their business and the printer was left on 24/7. It had been on but not used for several weeks prior to attempting to print this particular job. The cartridge in question had been built with a new wiper blade, doctor blade and drum 11 months earlier and was just below half full.
It could be helpful to give your customers a gentle reminder from time to time that printers need to be turned off after a days work. Problems such as this will start to arise, particularly as these printers age.
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