Digital BW, The Print

Hello everyone,
 I just posted this under the subject Idle Printer Syndrom but as 
that is somewhat obscure I renamed it. I see a lot of posts about 
having trouble reinitializing a printer 
after it's been idle for awhile so I thought I would add my two cents 
worth in hopes that it will help. Anyone new to this art should be 
FYI'd. 
All the inks currently made and used for the Epson printers 
contain anywhere from 50% to 85% water, a cosolvent, and of course 
the a pigment and/or dye (they contain a lot of other stuff to but 
they aren't relevant to this topic). A good ink jet ink is designed 
to behave very differently at different stages of its life cycle. 
THIS IS WHERE MOST STARTUP ISSUES ARE COMING FROM: When the ink exits 
the print head and makes contact with a paper it's designed to 
rapidly alter it's behavior from a stable suspension of extremly fine 
particles (<1 micron) to a thick gooey film in the space of 
microseconds to several seconds. It does this by allowing the 
water/cosolvent system to rapidly soak into the paper leaving the 
pigment behind. When this happens on the paper it's great. If it 
happens in your print head it's not so great. It causes the dreaded 
clogs, and some other issues that would make you turn green just 
thinking about.The more pigment in the ink the faster the ink/pigment 
sysem reaches saturation and clogs.
Avoiding the problem is simple. Keep the ink from drying out in 
the printhead. This can be accomplished several ways. Most of which 
people here have discovered and suggested. DO this BEFORE you leave 
your printer idle.
1. Remove the ink from the heads and replace with flush or OEM 
cartridges. The oem are dye based and carry a lot of glycerine/deg in 
them so they stay liquid much longer.
2. Store your printer in a humidity controlled room-not really 
feasable and I don't have a recommeded min/max humidity, sorry.
3. Prime or print often. It can't dry out in the head if it's on 
the paper.
4. Some CIS users have also run into this problem. Especially in 
the two darkest inks. The problem here is that water will evaporate 
right through the tubing leaving the cosolvents and pigments behind 
to start the film cascade that's supposed to happen on the paper. The 
dryer climate the CIS/printer system is in the faster this will 
happen. If your going to store your printer for long time remove the 
inks from the tubing.
I hope this helps and if anyone would like to add something 
please let me know.

Jeff