I made the printer exercise image a couple months back for my Canon 8300. Since I do not print on a hardly any gloss paper, I make a plot file using gloss media settings, but print on plain cheap paper. While there has been some talk on other threads about printing an 8X11 or nozzle check every few days, I do not think that is enough, as you will be hardly doing anything with PM, PC or BK/MBK depending on media type. The test print runs about 1ml of ink total, roughly 0.1 ml per color. So printing this out 3 times a week will use 150ml per year. This was just a quick hack image for now, ideally you would want to send another image with a few squares of MBK ink, to exercise you MBK if your main image is set for gloss papers.
If you would like to print unattended while on vacation, the LPR DOS command will send your plotfile to the printer, which can be scheduled by the windows task scheduler, with the LPR command in a batch file.