This is the cleaning routine we wish we'd started sooner. See why a dirty fi-8170 puts a white streak on every scan for how we found out the hard way. Here's what actually gets rid of it.
Watch Ricoh's official maintenance demonstration
This manufacturer video shows the maintenance points on the fi-8170 family. Use it with the current operator guide for your exact model and power the scanner down before cleaning.
Official video by Ricoh Image Scanner Global. YouTube loads only after you press play.
1. Turn it off and open the feeder
Power down the scanner and open the ADF unit the way you would to clear a jam. You need direct access to the glass strip the cards slide over and the rollers that grip and feed them.
2. Wipe the glass
Gently wipe the glass sections with a soft, lint-free cloth. No paper towels, no abrasive cleaner. Dust, a fingerprint, or a light scratch on this strip is what puts a fixed vertical line on every card that passes under it, which is why it's the first thing to check when a streak shows up in the same spot scan after scan.
3. Wipe the rollers
The feed roller and eject roller do the physical work of pulling each card through. Rotate each one by hand as you wipe it with a soft cloth dampened with isopropyl alcohol, 90% or higher, so the whole surface gets cleaned, not just the part facing you. Go easy around the sponge sections built into the rollers; they're not meant to take pressure or scraping.
4. Turn on Vertical Streak Detection
The fi-8170's driver has a setting, under Device Setting in the Software Operation Panel, that watches for a dirty glass and throws a warning instead of letting a bad batch scan through unnoticed. It ships off by default. Turning it on once means the scanner tells you before 1,500 cards need a redo, not after.
How often
PFU/Ricoh doesn't publish a fixed page count for this model specifically. The honest answer is to clean it when a streak shows up, and again on a rough schedule, more often for anyone running thousands of cards a month than for occasional use. A genuine ScanAid kit built for the fi-8170 covers the cloths, swabs and cleaner in one box, plus the two rollers as spares once the originals wear down.
ScanAid kit for the fi-8170 → (paid link) The full fi-8170 review