I have run an Epson 7900 for about a year and a half, ever since they came out. Prior to that, I have had a 7800, 7600, and even a 7500. They all had one thing in common, ink clogs and lots of them. If waste ink caused global warming or depleted the ozone layer, we would be in serious trouble.
I am a hobbyist printer, and as such tend to print in batches every 4 to 6 weeks, so I likely get more clogs from disuse atrophy. I keep the humidity controlled around 50%, but that did not seem to help. Oddly enough, my last two printers were picked up by my brother in law, and he gets no clogs at all. He keeps his units in a heated basement. Maybe I should print from his house?
Anyway, I felt I got proactive and smart by printing a pattern check every 2 to 3 days. This has yielded two plus months of absolutely no clogs. The previous printers would do a clean cycle on every start up, which I felt defeated the concept of printing a pattern every few days as the total ink use would exceed the inevitable cleaning cycles if aI just let it sit for the 4 to 6 weeks.
So when it came time to actually print something, I was all excited to smoothly begin with no cleaning cycles needed this time. All was going great, and I finally was bonding with Epson after all these years of spending thousands and thousands of dollars on their products, only to be frustrated. And then bang, the cyan channel just dropped out almost completely. Paired cleaning cycles actually lost the few nozzles that were still firing until the cyan channel was totally blank. No amount of cleaning would bring it back at all. I even tried to print big patches of cyan, and got sheets of grey. Not looking good.
So lets try emailing and phoning Epson support, maybe they have seen this before? All they can offer is to set up an expensive service call. Since I am in a smaller city on the BC coast, they probably need to bring them in on a special Concord flight. Better take out a mortgage on the house for the first time in 20 years. Less costly to buy a new unit and send this one to the land fill.
Fortunately, with the help of those who post their experiences on the internet, I was able to explore paired cleaning in the service mode. These seem to be more efficient and allow escalating strength of each paired channel. Right away I had cleared the blocked cyan channel. Again later, the cyan channel was partially lost, and could not be brought back in the normal paired cleaning, and required the service mode ounce again.
So for those with clog issues on an epson 7900, try to print a test pattern every few days to keep the unit clog free, and if a clog does develop that can not be cleared, try looking at cleaning in the service mode, where you can use 4 different levels of strength with paired channel cleaning.
So for investing advice, does one go long on Epson for all the ink they will sell and the otherwise solid large format printers, or does one short Epson for crappy service information and forever ongoing clog issues?
Regards,
D White
