Experimenting with Extreme-Cleaning a Badly Clogged HP 8022 Printhead

Today I’m going to share some information about cleaning a badly clogged HP 8022 printhead based on some experiments I’ve done. For these experiments, I used a printhead 910 in specific, but hopefully, it should be able to shine some light on how to clean other models, as well.

What to Use to Clean your Printhead

I’ve cleaned a lot of other printheads, too, like 936, 902, and 564, for example. First, I should explain that I typically use the BCH printhead cleaning kit, which you can find on our website.

Step One: Changing the Cartridge and Testing the Printhead

The first thing to do is remove the old cartridge, insert a new one, and run a test. HP printers all have different levels of cleaning. The first time you run the cleaning, you’ll notice that not much happens. However, after running the cleaning program enough times, you’ll see that the printer spits out a piece of paper.

This paper will show you the result of the cleanings. You will be able to see the severity of the clog in your printhead by looking at the text printed on this paper. If all of the lines of text are clear, fully printed, and don’t have any faded text, then your printhead isn’t doing too badly.

If your lines of text are cut off in some parts, then that means you still have a bit of a clog. When you run the test, it should test both the color and black ink. You will then be able to tell which parts are clogged based on which colors do or don’t show up.

Step Two: Preparing

The cleaning process of this printhead will have multiple parts. Once you’ve run the cleaning programs and diagnosed which parts are clogged, you’ll be able to tell what exactly you need to clean. Before we do the actual cleaning process, we’ll run the printer’s clean function three times.

Step Three: Flushing the System

we’ll start by using the cleaning liquid linked above and flushing the system. All you have to do is inject the solution into the printer system and let it sit for 12 hours. Then we’ll run the printer’s cleaning function three more times. Most printers won’t be back to normal after a single flush, and you’ll probably have to do this a second time.

After two or three flushes, the colors will seem okay. However, if you run another cleaning, you’ll begin to notice that one of the colors may turn out badly. This step is where my experimenting comes in.

Step Four: The Experiment

Now, I don’t really recommend that you experiment with this kind of thing at home, so that’s why I’m making this tutorial in the first place. We clean and repair many printers, so we tend to have enough parts lying around to do some experimenting.

I will summarize the experiments here, but you can get a more detailed understanding of them by watching this video on my YouTube channel.

Epson and Ultrasonic

The first thing I tried was ultrasonic, which I don’t usually do with Epson because they print things based on membrane technology. However, I often do this for HP or Canon printers, which you can see in many of my other videos.

The ultrasonic process creates millions of tiny bubbles inside the printhead, which push the ink up. When I ran this experiment with the Epson printhead, I noticed that the cyan didn’t have enough going up. My conclusion to this experiment was not to run Epson through the ultrasonic system — or at least, dont do it for as long as I did.

Experimenting with that Morning’s Printhead

The morning of the experiment, we received a printhead that wasn’t improving after multiple cleaning cycles. We noticed that it could print nicely in one color, which meant the nozzles weren’t clogged.

This led me to believe something was wrong with the ink supply, whether it wasn’t sealed properly or the chambers had an ink clog. After further examination, the latter was confirmed. To solve this, I don’t inject the solution directly. Instead, I start by drawing the ink backward. That way, anything blocking the ink channel should be sucked backward toward the syringe. Then I use the solution cleaning method.

In addition, the seal on this particular HP model was not great. To fix this, I added a washer to the seal for an extra layer of security. If there’s any gap in the seal, the printer will suck air rather than the ink. Then I flushed it again and ran it through a cleaning twelve hours later. After two additional cleanings, the printhead was working good as new.

We hope you enjoyed this blog! Visit us at BCHtechnologies.com, or stop by our physical location in Greensboro, North Carolina. Cheers!