[PRL] Of printers, jamming, and relative humidity

Richard C. Cobbe cobbe at ccs.neu.edu
Fri Jul 2 12:03:19 EDT 2004


As those of you who've been in the office all morning can attest, I've
had a rather trying day with gaugin and hiro.  In my first attempts,
gaugin was not able to print a single page before jamming; hiro was not
faring much better.  This has of course been happening all week, but it
was significantly worse this morning.

I think I may have a theory about the cause of the problem: the relative
humidity in here was too much for the printers.  Or rather, it was too
much for the paper: when there's a lot of moisture in the air, paper
tends to get thicker, stickier, and curl up, and I can easily see this
causing jams.

So, I closed the windows, cranked up the A/C, and waited a couple of
hours.  My first attempt on gaugin resulted in a jam, so I cleaned all
the paper out of both drawers, opened a new ream, and tried again:
worked perfectly.  I didn't even have the annoying little creases about
halfway down the page on the right that I know some of you have noticed.

While I won't claim that this conclusively proves my theory, it does
suggest that I'm on to something.  If I'm right, then this suggests two
things:

 1) When it's really humid out, close the windows.  The thermostat in
    WVH 308 appears to be doing the Right Thing now (or at least a close
    approximation to same), so we shouldn't need to rely on the windows
    to prevent it from turning into a meat freezer in here.

 2) Don't open a package of paper and let it sit around on the counter
    for a couple of days, sucking up all the moisture in the air.  The
    drawers on both printers can hold a full ream without jamming; just
    put the whole thing in.

    (Well, Hiro's bottom drawer is still cursed, I think, but otherwise
    the above statement holds.)

Richard



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