Proper copier maintenance is essential to lowering printing costs and avoiding emergencies. Any maintenance routine should include these four steps.

Four Key Components of Proper Copier Maintenance

Proper and regular maintenance is essential to reducing the costs associated with business machines, including copy machines. This is particularly true if your business owns rather than leases its office copiers. Routine copy machine service can reduce short-term operating expenses as well as the total cost of ownership. There are four vital elements to any successful copier maintenance plan: cleaning, lubricating, adjusting and repairing worn parts.

Copy Machine Cleaning

Keeping your copier clean begins with good habits. The office space needs to be as dust-free as possible, and you shouldn’t use the copier for sticky notes and children’s artwork. Clean the keypad glass and plastic daily, and a weekly exterior wipe-down is a good idea as well. The most important copier cleaning occurs inside the machine, and how often this cleaning is required depends on usage. It’s generally recommended to let a professional handle interior cleaning to avoid misalignment.

Copy Machine Lubricating

If your copier ever squeaks, then you know that copier lubrication is long overdue. All the moving parts within your machine require lubricant, and that substance breaks down over time. When lubricant isn’t doing its job, you get increased friction, which leads to faster part wear as well as noisy operation and less-than-optimal printing performance. Where and how often to lubricate will depend on your model and should be outlined in the owner’s manual.

Copier Machine Adjusting

Due to those moving parts, copiers require proper alignment. When alignment is off just a little, you can experience odd printing behavior. When alignment is off a lot, parts can become damaged and overall performance may be unreliable. General care of the machine, including lubricating, helps to avoid sharp misalignment, but gradual misalignment is to be expected. Generally, a quarterly inspection and tuneup by a technician is enough to keep a copier in optimal alignment.

Repairing Worn Parts

Perhaps the biggest mistake business machine owners make is not replacing parts when substantial signs of wear are evident. Wear on a moving part makes the copier work harder, and that extra abuse is shared among all the parts that make up the mechanism. By proactively replacing worn parts, you reduce the costs associated with replacing other parts over the long-term.