Why your printer keeps disappearing (and how to make it stop)

It worked last Tuesday. Today the laptop says the printer is offline, the phone cannot see it at all, and turning everything off and on has stopped helping. This is the single most common call we get from households, and it is almost never a broken printer.

What is actually going on

Most home printers get an address from your router when they connect, and most routers hand out addresses that expire. When yours expires, the router may give the printer a different one. Your laptop is still looking for the old address, so as far as it is concerned the printer has vanished.

Add a router reboot after a storm, a firmware update that resets the wireless settings, or a new router from your internet provider, and the printer quietly drops off the network while appearing to be perfectly fine on its own screen.

What usually fixes it for good

• Give the printer a fixed address on your network so it stops moving. This is the real fix and it takes a few minutes in the router settings

• Connect the printer to the 2.4 GHz band rather than 5 GHz. Most home printers only support 2.4, and many routers now broadcast both under one name

• Remove the printer from your computer entirely and add it back once it has a fixed address, so the computer stops chasing the stale one

• If your provider swapped your router recently, expect every wireless device in the house to need reconnecting, not just the printer

When it is worth calling someone

If you have done the reinstall dance more than twice, the problem is on the network side and reinstalling will not hold. That is a single visit for us, and it usually covers the rest of the house at the same time: the thermostat that dropped off, the camera that stopped recording, the laptop that only works in one room.

We cover Iowa City, Coralville, North Liberty, Tiffin, Solon, Riverside, Cedar Rapids, West Branch, and Mount Pleasant. You hear the price before we start, and if it turns out to be a five-minute fix we will say so.