4 Best Practices To Properly Clean Your Office Copier, Printer, & MFP

Keeping your office copiers and printers clean is crucial. Especially when copying, printing, and scanning are all essential elements of your daily operations.

When cleaning is not made a rule or standard process at your organization, the quality of output can be affected, as well as the general health of your devices.

At LDI, our office copier and printer technicians have seen the stark difference between a client’s printing equipment that’s routinely cleaned versus an environment that is not, countless times. Unfortunately, by not routinely cleaning your devices, the devices will in turn be damaged and eventually unusable.

It’s up to your business to enforce rules that help properly clean, maintain, and optimize each of your devices.

This article will cover the top four steps needed to properly clean your office copier, printer, and multifunction printer (MFP). By the end of this article, you will better understand the best practices to abide by in order to keep your devices running effectively.

What Are 4 Cleaning Tips To Maintain Your Printing Devices? 

Cleaning your print equipment can be scary. There are a lot of working parts that we may not want to touch if we don’t understand what they do.

However, to keep your print equipment functioning normally, cleaning is imperative. We’ve gone ahead and broken down a few essential cleaning best practices to follow which include specific parts to clean.

Let’s review the four best practices to follow when cleaning your office copiers, printers, and MFPs.

What Are 4 Factors To Help Your Business Select The Right CSP?

When considering cloud services for your business, it’s essential to have a baseline of elements to refer to when selecting a cloud services provider.

These elements should reflect what to look for in a cloud services provider and help you make an educated decision based on your business’s needs and requirements.

Let’s dive into four factors to consider when choosing a cloud services provider for your business.

1. Sanitize The OP Panel

The OP panel or touch panel is often considered one of the dirtiest places on an office copier or MFP. This is because, the OP panel can often get touched to complete print, copy, scan, or fax jobs. 

Disinfecting your OP panel is key, to keep your device clean and employees safe. Why?

Well, we all know how dirty our hands can get. Whether we can visibly see the dirt on our hands or not, our hands can carry a lot of germs and bacteria. 

To keep your device clean and sanitized, try spraying an alcohol-based solution on a lint-free cloth and wiping the OP panel and buttons gently. Ideally, disinfecting the OP panel should occur after every use.

The alcohol-based solution should consist of up to 70% alcohol and 30% room temperature water. The cloth should not be soaking wet with a solution but should be damp enough to clean the OP panel surface.

It’s imperative to spray the towel with the solution rather than directly onto the screen seeing as that can damage the glass.

To better enforce this method of disinfecting the device, consider leaving a spray bottle and clean lint-free towel tucked away in a cabinet not too far away from the device. This way you don’t run into the possibility of spilling the solution all over the device.

2. Clean OP Panel & Copier Glass Regularly 

On top of disinfecting the OP panel, you can use Windex to remove any smudges or streaks on both the OP panel and copier glass.

It’s important to clean your copier glass every day, especially seeing as smudges or streaks left on the glass can affect the copy quality and lead to an unusable copy machine if left dirty for too long.

Think of it this way. The longer the dirt stays caked onto the copier glass, the harder it is to come off.

Same deal for the OP Panel. More often than not, it can be easy to forget to clean the one area that gets touched the most often.

However, if your business fails to clean it, the harder it is to clean later down the line.

Watch the cleaning tutorial below to learn how to effectively clean the OP panel and copier glass of your printing device.

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3. Dust With Lint-Free Cloth 

Printing devices get dusty, just like any other piece of equipment. Dusting every week is crucial because it can severely impact the machine. 

For example, a build-up of dust on your device can lead to poor copy quality and skewing where the print appears tilted on a page. It can also lead to paper jamming due to the dust getting caught in the device’s rollers. 

To properly dust a printing device, use a lint-free or microfiber cloth to gently wipe the machine. Gently wipe the surfaces with the cloth and make sure to wipe down the document feeder.

The document feeder is responsible for feeding your originals to use for copying, scanning, and faxing.

Wiping this area of the device is imperative to prevent any dust from going directly into the machine.

We recommend leaving the internal cleaning to the professionals and only dusting the external surfaces as part of your routine cleaning process.

4. Organize Surrounding Area 

You may be thinking, “Aren’t we talking about cleaning the device, not organizing around the device?”

While that thought isn’t exactly wrong, the surrounding area needs to be clean and orderly as well. The reason?

To prevent any staples or paperclips from accidentally entering the device. When staples and paperclips fall within the device near the document feeder, they can cause jamming or shortages. 

They can often get stuck within the quarter-inch space near the document feeder. For the MFPs that don’t come equipped with a finisher, there’s always a quarter-inch space left open for small items to fall inside.

For good measure, keep any accessories or tools separate from your device at all times to prevent any small items from falling into the machine.

Is Your Business Ready To Clean Its Printing Devices?

Whether you’ve had your printing devices for one month or a few years, cleaning them regularly will make a difference.

Now that we outlined best practices when enforcing cleaning standards at your company, do you think your business is ready?

To prepare your company on how to best clean a device you can use these few methods:

• Hold a team meeting where an administrator demonstrates how to clean and sanitize the device after every use.
• Print and post a ‘how-to’ infographic tutorial to be posted on the wall close to the device.
• Send an email to all employees with a cleaning schedule

No matter what steps you take to ensure your devices stay clean, consider options that are interactive and help employees understand the importance.

At LDI, we recommend cleaning best practices as a part of our managed print program to keep your devices healthy and running smoothly.

To learn more about how to properly maintain your printing devices, read our article on the five maintenance tips to extend the lifespan of your office copiers & MFPs.