Sorry to have missed your post until now Blue moon. You make good points and I love your humor. I am glad all of this work has helped you - great community here.
It's true I have been quiet, but I have also been thinking. I have identified what I think is our greatest enemy considering X900 printhead clogs.
...TIME
Not the time you have owned yours, or hope to own yours, without experiencing the unclear-able clogs from hell. That time has no bearing. And it's not the amount of time that's passed since your last clog. That doesn't matter either. What time does then? It's the amount of time that passes from the moment your clog forms, to the moment you get to clearing it. THAT is the ever critical "time" that we are all up against owning X900 printers. Get to your clog soon enough and you're fine. Wait too long and you are thoroughly,entirely, screwed.
I don't go out on a limb waving flags of caution often, but I'll do it now. If you print multiple times per week you're likely in the best shape of all considering clog management. But if you don't print multiple times per week, you've GOT to get yourself into the habit of routine maintenance. Run some nonsense print through your machine on plain paper at least twice a week. Better would be three times a week. And once a week, please, run a nozzle check pattern. If you find a clog, clear it right then.
Think of your printer like it's a dog. Maybe a really lazy dog. One you have to walk, and to feed, just not every single day. Maybe every third day. I believe doing this will keep you and your X900 happy.
I believe the best thing anyone could do for all of our X900 users is to create an image that runs each channel individually, specifically, just like a nozzle check pattern does. Only have it print an area large enough to flush the most vulnerable ink sitting right out there in the printhead face. If we ran a print like that twice a week I'll bet clogs could be a thing of the past for all of us.
HAL suggested this a while back. I created a print for everyone to download here but it does not access each channel accurate enough. It does not purge all of the nozzles on all of the channels. I had been running this print that I made through my machine twice a week for a couple of months of no "real" printing and never saw banding or any other problems. Then one day I organized my short stack of routine plain paper cleaning prints and noticed a color shift in some of the prints when I compared the first to the most recent. I did a nozzle check and sure enough I had clogs all over the place. Scared the crap out of me. All of the clogs cleared with ease, thank the lord, but the point was made - I need a new system.
So at this point I am putting out a request. For sure this forum is populated with far greater/wiser/more experienced/more connected X900 users than me. So maybe one of you can step up and flex your network, maybe put some requests out for the development of a routine maintenance doc we can regularly run. In an awesomely optimistic world it would be great if Epson themselves could work something like this into a firmwear upgrade. Perhaps a setting for while you're away - maybe call it "Holiday Mode". Put some cheap roll paper in the machine, set it to Holiday Mode, then fly to Aruba with your girl (or guy) and not a worry to be had. Twice a week the X900 fires an inch or two of ink across the sheet then advances to the next inch in a few days. You come home three weeks later to twenty inches of home made Christmas wrapping paper hanging out the face of your printer, and you have no clogs.
I have been contacted several times behind the scenes of this site by now - no I am not joining any class action lawsuits against Epson. Not my style. But I WILL say this...
...It would sure be nice if Epson gave us a "Holiday Mode".
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