Recently I purchased a HP z3100 printer. The documentation recommends to leave the printer powered on all the time. My situation is that I work in another city, and away from home Monday through Friday. I can only print on weekends. Does it make sense to turn the printer off while I'm away.

Thanks in advance.

Most owners will recommend that you leave it on all the time.

Jim

For what it is worth, I've had the Z3100 in a variety of use modes: daily for weeks at a time, one print per week with the power left on, leaving the power off for a few days at a time and powering up only for an occasional print or two, and leaving it shut down during multi-week absences followed by a flurry of printing. The machine seemed to perform just fine and in a consistent manner regardless of the power on/off situation. This treatment is not exactly what the manual recommends, but so far, I haven't discovered any problems over the past 18 months.

Rick

You won't notice a 'problem' by not leaving it on, unless you do periodic nozzle checks, and see how many are clogging because it's left shut off.

The Z3100 wakes up from sleep mode and runs a cycle about once every 24 hours. This process prevents nozzle clogs and the wasted ink and downtime associated with fixing the clog. Since I owned a printer that constantly clogged before trading up to the Z3100, I consider this one of the best features of the Z. Other than power outages and an infrequent reboot, mine hasn't been off since I bought it.

Every 6 hours.

I turned off my 3100 , do the same with the 3200. I can't stand the fans running. There is no true idle mode like Epson. For a week long powered off lapse there should be no detriment at all if the printer is fairly new. If you had printed a lot and many nozzles were already becoming used* then you would see them deteriorate rapidly by doing so.
I would say that I do turn on all HP printers at least once every three weeks to let it prime, purge, recap and wipe the heads. Printing a small letter size page with a test page would be better although I don't.

Thanks everyone for your recommendations! It seems that leaving the printer ON is best, if one can live with the noise.

I strongly considered leaving it off, even with regular use, because of the slight fan noise and regular maint noise. However after a week, I hear neither. The only time I even notice the fan noise is when we have a power outage. If it was in a room close to my bedroom however I would have to close the door. Oh - and the wife complained about the maint noise waking her in the middle of the night for a couple weeks. lol

Leave it on. Mine has been on for 20 months or so now. No problems. No clogs. It's quiet, only runs a cleaning cycle every now and then and that only takes a minute.

I left mine plugged in and in idle mode for 6 months while I was away. No serious problems to report. In fact after running a cleaning cycle, my diagnostic sheet shows not a single nozzle not firing. I did take out a couple of heads and wipe them down, as the red/black head seemed to be spraying ink around a bit.
cheers,
Paul