The Technician’s Diary is intended to provide an insight into the scope of the work that we undertake and an idea of the locations that we cover. Instead of writing a weekly list of jobs, from now on we will publish a monthly overview highlighting some of the more interesting or unusual cases.

August is often one of the quietest months of the year and we were surprised at how many times we were called out to faulty printers. Many of these faults could have been avoided by regular routine printer maintenance, which is one of our key services. Examples of incidents where servicing could have prevented an emergency call out are frayed or worn carriage belts on HP DesignJet 500, Z3200, Z6200, T790 and Z6100 all of which we have had to rescue recently. It is far more cost effective to have a service agreement than to endure printer down-time and pay a call out charge.

Some problems cannot be predicted and must be sorted out when they occur. In recent weeks we have had plenty of these to fix, including a Kyocera M6026 in Salisbury with a faulty developer, A Lexmark T640 in Ferndown with a paper jam caused by a small bit of debris getting caught in the paper exit assembly. We attended an HP M375 in Christchurch with a broken fuser, cleaned spilt toner from an HP CP4525 in Bournemouth and had to service an Oki M861 in New Milton with dirty LEDs which resulted in light areas of print.

Calls in Somerset, Devon and Cornwall resulted attending all sorts of problems from a small piece of dried glue which had become lodged in a Samsung CLX 6220 in Bath and was causing paper jams, to corrupted firmware leading to garbled print from A Utax 3005ci in Wadebridge. We also attended HP Colour LaserJets, Konica Minolta Bizhubs as well as Oki and Brother printers and travelled to Bristol, Exeter, Plymouth, Cheddar, Polzeath and Barnstaple.