Today I’ll be going over the process of cleaning a Photosmart printhead with you. The printer we got for the demonstration (which you can watch here) was from Facebook Marketplace for only $30. Other listings we saw for used printers of this model were selling for an average of around $120 (not including shipping), so I’d say we got a pretty good deal. I even found one review saying that this printer model was able to print over 20,000 pages.

When I ran a [print quality report, it showed a very heavily clogged Photosmart black printhead, but all of the other colors looked like they would be alright. The first thing we tried to do to fix this was to make what I called a cleaning cartridge.

Make a cleaning cartridge

We took a blank cartridge and filled it with BCH brand cleaning solution. Then we used a syringe to push the cleaning solution down into the printhead. When we printed out another test page, it was still heavily clogged, but we made a little progress.

Take out the printhead

The second method we attempted was to take the printhead out. In the demonstration, you can see the dried black ink on the Photosmart nozzles. We wrapped the printhead in a wet paper towel, and what we did after that may sound a bit strange, but it has a pretty high success rate.

Vacuum the printhead

We carefully used a standard household vacuum cleaner to suck on the printhead. The suction created by the vacuum’s hose will, at the very least, loosen the clogs a bit more. If you try this method, don’t hold your vacuum’s hose to the printhead for more than a few seconds at a time.

The cleaning solution softened some of the clogs in our printhead, and then the vacuum removed them. However, method number two didn’t completely fix the problem in a way I was satisfied with, so I decided it was time to pull out the big guns.

High-pressure steamer

Our third and final method is to use something called a high-pressured steamer. If you don’t already own one, high-pressured steamers are available on Amazon for around $30. High-pressured steamers are very effective against stubborn clogs, and you can also use them to complete various household chores.

Make sure that after you use the high-pressured steamer on the printhead, you dry the electronic ribbon on the side of the cartridge entirely before putting it back into the printer. If you don’t, you may get the same message I did: “Ink system error. Please restart printer”.

After restarting the printer, the test page I printed came out almost entirely blank. If this happens to you, don’t worry. The high-pressured steamer puts a lot of water into the printhead, making sense for this to happen. Use your printer’s built-in printhead cleaning function to get the ink to flow into the printhead properly. You should then be able to go back to printing as you please.