Roland LEJ-640 ink consumption

[spawn2031]

Hello all, I am curious as to if anyone know how long a standard 220ml ink cartridge will last in a Roland LEJ-640 without it being used? My bosses asked me to find out how long the printer could sit without usage before the heads dry up. I know the cartridges slowly drip through the heads to keep them moist. Does anyone have a ballpark on that rate?

Thank you

 

[jtinker]

I'm no expert but I have fixed a few of ours before. I believe roland has an automatic system that turns on every few hours to pull ink through the head to avoid that. As long as secondary power is on. If you turn off the secondary power then every day is another dead pixel. For reference, one of our newer employees had turned off the printer and we left for the weekend. When we returned, we had lost about 1/8 of the cyan on the head with some pretty serious banding. Thats after two days.

Short answer: Keep it plugged in and maintain secondary power, keep it there as long as you like but youll probably have to change the ink because it would get used up in the cleaning cycles over time.
If you plan to take it off power all together then the head will be destroyed in a few weeks time unless you flush the lines.
Ink consumption isnt much, there are three clean types on that model i belive,

1: head
2: head + lines
3: head + lines + cartridge

The cleaning cycles only go for the first one.
You can set your clean cycle intervals longer to extend the lifetime of the cartridges but you would hvae to balance that on how much is it really worth if you have a head that doesnt last as long because its full of clogged nozels.

 

[spawn2031]

Yeah, it definitely does have that auto feature built in, I've heard it kick in before. Basically what I am trying to figure out is how much would it cost us to let this machine sit and still keep it in working condition. Just how fast is it going to eat though cartridges. Turns out this is not the printer that is best for our uses but they still want t keep it around.

 

[El Barto]

While I don't think the heads will be a problem (assuming they're properly capped), the white ink will definitely separate and become useless. The CW is that you need to pull the whites out and shake them daily, and even then what's in the lines/dampers will go bad. Then you need to run a couple of medium/powerful cleans to get red of that and pull freshly shaken ink through the system. While it does have a built in recirculate feature, it doesn't happen nearly often enough to prevent problems with the white ink.

Another consideration for your purposes is that these things waste a whole lot of ink. We replaced 1 clear cart per month, despite the fact that we never ran a single job that used it. Stuff just vanishes into the drain bottle. Our vendor actually suggested slapping cleaning fluid carts into that slow since they're [very slightly] cheaper. If you're going to keep it mothballed you need to plan for that.

 

[boxerbay]

use it or lose it applies here.