# Clearing your Inky display best practices

**URL:** <https://forums.pimoroni.com/t/clearing-your-inky-display-best-practices/27575>\
**Category:** Raspberry Pi\
**Created:** [April 1, 2025, 5:46am UTC](https://forums.pimoroni.com/t/clearing-your-inky-display-best-practices/27575 "2025-04-01T05:46:39Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![danny](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/848f3c/32.png) [@danny](https://forums.pimoroni.com/u/danny)\
**Post date:** [April 1, 2025, 5:46am UTC](https://forums.pimoroni.com/t/clearing-your-inky-display-best-practices/27575/1 "2025-04-01T05:46:39Z")

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Hi,

I’m enjoying my new Inky Impression 4". But one thing I’m not clear about is why exactly ‘clearing’ (or ‘cleaning’) an Inky display matters.

[This video](https://youtu.be/daO46JaVHOs?si=ei1ayM6muLrWP789&t=380) says it’s good practice to do it, and I’ve noticed both a [clear.py](https://github.com/pimoroni/inky/blob/main/examples/7color/clear.py) and clean.py in the official examples.

**Is it simply to reduce/remove ghosting ahead of the next image rendered?** Much like how a Kindle/Kobo will occasionally refresh itself to ‘clean’ the text. **Or does it help prevent _long-term_ ghosting, or somehow else help with longevity**?

I’m making a visual clock that shows a different image every hour (or few hours) based on a CRON job. Both clear.py and clean.py take over a minute to run on my setup, so I’d ideally _not_ do this every hour.

My clock only runs during waking hours (5am–8pm), so I suppose I could just run the clear.py once before bedtime. I just don’t know if that’s going to lessen the lifetime of my display.

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**Author:** ![bablokb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ee59a6/32.png) [@bablokb](https://forums.pimoroni.com/u/bablokb)\
**Post date:** [April 1, 2025, 7:30am UTC](https://forums.pimoroni.com/t/clearing-your-inky-display-best-practices/27575/2 "2025-04-01T07:30:38Z")

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I investigated this problem already and did not find any hard facts (e.g. something in a datasheet) about this “cleaning/clearing”. Waveshare recommends this as a standard-procedure, and CircuitPython has this built in.

Personally, I used an InkyImpression (5.7") without clearing for a long time. What I can see is ghosting, but this highly depends on what I put on the screen. If you are rendering images that are not similar (i.e. have more or less different pixel-values) you should not see any ghosting.

My plan is to add cleaning on a regular basis (e.g. once a week), but since this has no high priority I doubt it will make it soon to the top of the list.