Manually cleaning your printhead should be an essential part of your printer maintenance routine. We recommend that you perform a manual printhead cleaning at least once a week if you use your printer several times a week. This will make sure that the ink can always flow smoothly and the nozzles in your printhead are not clogged. The longer you have your printer in use without cleaning the printhead, the more ink residue will build up in the nozzles of the printhead over time; so building the habit of manually cleaning the printhead regularly will go a long way in keeping your printer running smoothly.

If your cartridges are not low on ink, yet colors are either missing from your prints, coming out streaky, or just completely off, then you've come to the right place. You should start by printing what's called a nozzle check. A nozzle check is a test print (shown below) that you can usually run from your printer’s display panel to make sure your Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black ink colors flow well inside the printer. To run a nozzle check for your specific printer model, please check your printer manual or search up how to run a nozzle check for your printer model.

If your nozzle check looks off, streaky or nothing like the image above, the time has come to clean your printhead. Start by going to your printer's display panel and locating the maintenance menu to have the printer run an internal printhead cleaning cycle. To get your printer run a cleaning for your specific model, please check your printer manual or search up how to do a cleaning for your printer model online. After your printer's cleaning cycle is done, run a nozzle check to see if your colors are coming out correctly. If the colors are still off, go back into the printer's maintenance menu, but this time select "deep cleaning." Run another nozzle check to see how the colors are showing. If the deep cleaning still does not work, then it's time to manually take out your printhead to clean it as explained in this article.

Let's walk you through how to do that using the food-safe paper2eat Printhead Cleaning Kit. Our cleaning kit was put together so you can have everything you need in one bag to quickly clean your printhead and resume your edible printing. Inside that cleaning kit, you'll find a syringe, a printhead cleaning solution, tweezers, an instruction manual, a soaking jar, a pair of tubes and gloves.

Before cleaning the printhead:

1. Upon receipt, tear open your cleaning kit ziplock bag from the top. 

2. Put on some gloves to avoid potentially multicolored hands and grab the clips that the cartridges in your printer came in.

3. Open up your Canon printer and carefully remove each cartridge. Be sure to keep the cartridges at an angle to avoid ink leaking from the bottom. Just press each cartridge into a clip and the clips should easily snap into place.

4. Hold the stop button for 5 seconds which will trigger the printer to put the printhead into place.

5. Pull up the lock lever that holds the printhead in place and unplug your printer.

Removing the printhead:

6. Remove the printhead from the printer (as shown in the video above). The printer model being used in the video is a Canon PIXMA TS9521C, and the way it's shown in the video may not apply to your printer model, so you may want to check your printer manual on how to remove yours (or search it up).

Cleaning the printhead:

7.  Pour some of the printhead cleaning solution into the soaking jar.

8. Using the tweezers, carefully remove the black seals and place them into the jar to let them soak for about 5 minutes.

9. Place the printhead in a clean container of your choice.

10. Grab the syringe and insert a tube onto the tip of it. Please note that there are two different-sized tubes in the cleaning kit due to the two different-sized nozzles in the printhead. For these instructions, we'll start with the larger tube.

11. Put the syringe into the cleaning solution bottle and pull the syringe plunger to suck the cleaning solution into the syringe.

12. Carefully attach the bottom of the large tube onto the large nozzle and slowly press the fluid through the syringe into the large nozzle until the fluid coming out of the bottom of the printhead is clear with no excess ink. Do NOT press the syringe hard, the solution needs to slowly enter the printhead.

13. When done with the large nozzle, remove the large tube from the tip of the syringe, insert the thinner one with the blue adapter and put the syringe back into the cleaning solution bottle to pull more fluid into it (like we did in step 11). We'll be using the thinner tube for the 4 remaining nozzles.

14. Carefully attach the bottom of the tube onto the nozzle and slowly press the fluid through the syringe into it (just like step 12). Repeat the process for each nozzle.

15. If you have a hard time flushing a nozzle, it may be too clogged. In that case, place a few drops of the cleaning solution on the nozzle and let it sit overnight (or for a couple of days). Then try flushing it again.

After cleaning the printhead:

16. Carefully pat dry all parts of the printhead (or let it air dry). Remove the black seals from the soaking jar and dry those as well.

17. Firmly place the black seals back into the printhead with their smooth sides facing up and their longer sides facing the rear.

18. Carefully place your printhead back into the printer and push down the lock lever. Plug your printer back in then press the power button to turn it on.

19. Remove each cartridge from their clip (the clips from steps 2-3) to put them back into the printhead.

20. Carefully insert the cartridges back into the printhead starting with the brighter inks and ending with the black cartridges. Make sure no ink spills into other slots. (Side note: The reason we recommend inserting the cartridges from bright to dark is in case spillage does accidentally happen. Brighter inks spilling into the darker ink slots would be minor, but darker inks spilling into the brighter ink slots could noticeably affect the color output come printing time.)

21. Close up your printer.

22. Print a final nozzle check to check your printer's ink flow. If your cleaning is successful, all colors should be showing like the example at the beginning of this article.