Epson 4800 nozzle clogging solved - well, nearly…

About six weeks ago I was despairing that my Epson 4800 inkjet printer would ever be reliable again and that it would forever more be clogging/losing ink channels.

This may be premature and stupid, but thanks to the advice from lots of people (an example of mass collaboration?), mostly on the Yahoo 4000/4800 forum, I think that I have pretty much resolved the problem (now that is a really stupid thing to say…) – here’s how.

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If you want to know the sort of frustration I have had with this printer over the last six months then clicking the “Nozzle Clogging” label will show you, most specifically – this posting.

In a previous posting I said that I was going to try someone else’s solution – here are the details. At the time I was not that confident that it would work simply because I had tried the “print often” approach to try to keep the printer happy; and it had not worked for long. Anyway I tried it and it initially did work, but after about a week the printer went back to its bad old ways and I went through a particularly traumatic weekend trying to coax it back into health, which I managed very early on the Monday morning, just in time to go to my day job. Being a bit sceptical that the new regime would work I did not use a cover because I could not find one, although I did use a wet sponge inside the printer cover; but I had been trying that for sometime anyway.

I decided to redouble my efforts.

That was six weeks ago – since then I have tried a few more things, learnt quite a lot, but most importantly I have only suffered from 5 clogs/ink channel losses, all involving the LM ink and twice the LK as well. In nearly all the cases this happened after an "auto something or other" happened - it sounded awfully like an automated cleaning cycle, but I have turned that function off, so I am completely in the dark as to what is actually happening when this happens and why.

In the first four cases only one simple nozzle clean brought back the nozzle check to perfect, with no repeated clean/rest/puddle clean cycles – the fifth, and most recent, took a full set of clean/rest/puddle clean cycles to clear, but I think I know why...

This is what I think is the reason for the worst case of clogging happening – Initially I bought a cheap interim solution (see cover posting here) and then bought a bespoke cover for the 4800 in anti-static vinyl on eBay. I used the cheap one for a couple of weeks and when the bespoke one arrived I put it on. I had stopped monitoring the humidity inside the printer by then. I restarted it when I had the problem and was very surprised to see that the humidity inside the printer head had dropped to about 40% – clearly, given my recent experience, this is on the borderline.

The bespoke cover fits better, but is not as long, leaving a gap around the bottom of the printer; does not have an apron to wrap around the under the paper tray (which is actually the transparent zip around top of the cheap storage bag/cover I tried – see photo below) and has a big gap at the back to allow access to the roll paper cover etc. All this means that there are plenty of gaps for the humidity to escape from the machine with the proper cover; much less so with the cheap interim one. I have now reverted to the cheap one and the humidity has climbed back to 50+% again. Leaving the under wrapper undone causes the humidity at the print head to reduce by 5-10% points (e.g. 55% to 48% humidity) – I guess, because humid air is heavier than dryer air, it simply falls out the bottom of the printer…



So effectively the printer has been available to print whenever I wanted it to except for one day.

So what have I done?
Below is the recipe for what currently works for me.

The recipe comes in three parts:

1. General set up and printer configuration
2. Printer exercise routine
3. Materials and techniques to have to hand

1. General set up and printer configuration

First – USE A COVER… an all enveloping cover, for the reasons described above – see photo below with the apron tucked under the paper tray.



I believe that this was the single most important thing I did. The cover is not to keep the printer clean, although that is not a bad idea in itself, but to keep the humidity inside the printer up. In a previous post I reported on what I found it did for the humidity, but essentially I found that combined with a wet sponge it keeps the humidity inside the printer at about 50%. I believe that keeping the humidity up is the key to a happy (not-clogging much) printer.

Place a wet sponge in a tray in the paper tray – see photo below – the aim is to provide a source of humidity inside the printer. I find that I need to refresh the sponge about once a week.



Be careful not to put too deep a tray in the paper tray. The paper lifting mechanism lifts across the whole paper tray width and if the sponge tray is too deep it will be pushed into the rod (arrowed in the photo above) and cause miss-feeds.

I also now permanently monitor the humidity inside the cover by placing a wireless remote sensor out of the way of the print head carriage to the far left of the printing area - see photo below. This sensor tends to read about 10% points below the sensor near the sponge in the paper tray (e.g. paper tray humidity reads 60%, inside the cover it reads 50%). If you do this be careful not to impede the print head movement at all, or you will hear a nasty and probably expensive crunching sound!



Turn off the auto nozzle check and cleaning function on the printer – this only seems to cause clogs. See my earlier posting about why and how to do this.

Turn off the auto paper size checking function – See my earlier posting about why and how to do this, but suffice to say that you will be using plain paper in the printer as part of the print “little and often” routine. I have found that this tends to cause the printer to stall as its sensitivity to correct paper size seems to be greater than the size tolerance on plain paper.


2. Printer exercise routine

Fill the paper tray with plain paper – I have found 100gsm paper to feed more reliably than normal cheap 80gsm copier paper.

Download and install the free utility MIS Autoprint (see here for instructions on how) and choose a purge file that exercises all the ink channels (here is why). Also make sure that you have “Print Preview” turned off in the printer set up, as that will stall the process as well. In my set up this uses about 0.6ml of ink a time, or 1.2ml a week.

Buy a copy of Harvey Head Cleaner – unless you are willing and able to print nozzle checks manually every morning and evening. Harvey makes sure that, by running a small amount of ink through all the ink channels by printing a nozzle check, you exercise the whole print head regularly. I have set Harvey to print twice a day at 7.00am and 7.00pm; I have also set it to run if I turn the computer on within 24 hours of the last scheduled run time – circled in red in the screen shot below. This makes sure that you automatically run a nozzle check even if you turn your computer on after the scheduled time.



The printer reports using 0.1-0.2ml of ink per nozzle check, although this seems high compared with 0.6ml for a full page of colour for the Autoprint output. In any case it uses around 2ml of ink a week, which is about the equivalent of 1-2 A4 prints, or 1/50th of the ink to clear a bad clogging problem.

The combined Autoprint and Harvey ink usage over a year would be around 180ml of ink if you religiously stuck to the regime, although even over a month I have only really managed to do 90% of it. This equates to a couple of major cleaning bouts – only you can tell whether the time and frustration vs. routine ink wastage equation works for you.

I am pretty sure that I can reduce the actual number of nozzle checks and Autoprints, but don’t want to tempt fate just yet. As you can see in the screen shot above you can also tell Harvey to "Skip check if printer used within xx hours".

For me the reduction in frustration and the increased availability of the printer to print when I want it to are well worth the effort, even if it is something that Epson should be ashamed of…

(If you think that this is wasteful of paper I put the nozzle check paper back into the paper tray so that I get 4 checks per sheet…).


3. Materials and techniques to have to hand

Learn how to do a “Puddle Clean” – my method is posted here.

Become aware of the head cleaning protocols that have built up as “lore” for Epson printers. This effectively amounts to:

• Do not use Auto nozzle check – it often just moves the problem around
• Only run two consecutive nozzle cleans before running a full page print of some sort
• It is often wise to let the printer rest for an hour or so if a couple of nozzle cleaning cycles and full page print have not cleared the problem
• For major clogging/ink channel losses use puddle cleaning

Buy some “Fixyourownprinter” head cleaning solution – I have found it is very effective in clearing clogs; more so than distilled water.

Useful things to have at hand are:

• A small torch/flashlight
• A 20ml syringe with plastic extension (Kwill filling tube)
• Distilled water
• Lint free wipes – Pec Pads, the same ones I use for sensor cleaning on my DSLRs - I use these wrapped around a stick instead of cotton buds which might leave strands of cotton around to upset the print head etc
  
• A sense of humour
• …and one final requirement: patience!

So if I have one piece of advice it is – KEEP THE HUMIDITY UP AT AROUND 50% – all the rest helps but does not do enough if the humidity drops significantly below 40%.

Now all I have to work out is what the "auto something or other" is and how to stop it and why the LM channel is always the first one affected – any ideas?

Good luck – please let me know if you have any suggestions, refinements or comments to make.

Just one more thing - I have no commercial connection with any of the companies producing any of the products or services mentioned in this blog, other than as a happy customer. Read more...

MIS Autoprint purge file update…

In a recent posting I suggested changing the purge file used with MIS Autoprint from the MIS 8 ink file to a multi patch file. I said I would post any evidence that I got that it was worthwhile or not to make the change when I had it – here it is.

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Recently the LK & LM ink channels dropped out on my 4800. So I ran the MIS 8 channel purge file and the combined 936 patch file through Autoprint manually to see whether it was worth changing the purge file.

Firstly – the MIS 8 image file printed out exactly (to my eye at least) as it had with only LM missing. So it looks as it the LK is not doing much either.

Below are scans of the combined 936 patch file. The first image is with all nozzles firing perfectly. The second is the same file printed, onto the same paper with the same printer settings, with both LM & LK missing (confirmed by nozzle checks before and after the prints were made).




As you can see there is quite a lot of difference between the two, mostly in the columns from “K” onwards. It is also clear that the M ink is being used, which it was not in the 8 ink file.

So my conclusion is that it was worth making the change. Read more...

Changing the purge image file I use with MIS Autoprint

In a previous posting I have gone through my experience with setting up and running MIS Autoprint. I have recently changed the purge pattern I use – this posting tells why I felt I needed to and what I changed it to.

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In my previous posting I have explained what MIS Autoprint does and how it fits into the nozzle clogging avoidance scheme for my Epson 4800 inkjet printer.

The whole point of using Autoprint it so “exercise” all the printer’s ink channels more thoroughly than just printing frequent nozzle checks alone manages.

I thought I was doing this by using the 8 channel purge file supplied by MIS, but recently I found a printout of it printed with the LM channel completely missing, as confirmed by the automated, via Harvey Head Cleaner, nozzle checks printed out in the morning before and an hour after the purge file automatically printed.

Below is a scan of what the 8 channel purge print looks like when all nozzles are running perfectly:



Below is a scan of what it looked like with the LM channel completely missing (but the M channel was perfect):



The M & LM ink blocks have tuned blue with no sign of M in either, and the blacks (K, LK & LLK) have taken on a bit of a green’ish tint; the Y, C & LC look normal. This tells me that whatever is going on the purge print is not faithfully using all the ink channels as I thought it was – which rather misses the point of the whole exercise. It is possible that the paper setting affects what inks the 4800 uses, but I don’t have any way of checking that without losing a channel again – which I have not intention of doing deliberately. Currently I use copier paper in the printer for these maintenance prints with the media type setting set to "Plain paper" in the pinter settings.

So now I have swapped the MIS 8 channel purge file – if you want to know how to do this then look at an earlier blog posting here – for one I made up myself (see below). This is derived from a couple of colour patch files from Permajet used for creating ICC profiles of their papers; each set having 936 patches. While I have no proof that they are any better at exercising all the ink channels than the simpler 8 channel purge file from MIS, it seems logical to think that it has a better chance.


If/when an ink channel goes missing I will check out the results and post them.

I have done that now and here are the results Read more...

Setting up and trouble shooting MIS Autoprint 2.0

Some inkjet printers are very prone to nozzle clogging and my Epson 4800 is certainly one of them. Frequent printing is often recommended as part of a package of solutions to try to avoid the problem. For those who do not need to print frequently this is a nuisance, but for those unable to do so because they are away etc this is a real problem. MIS Associates have very generously made their Autoprint utility freely available to help solve the problem.

I have tried to use the utility a couple of times and come across annoying little problems which stopped me using it, but given my clogging problems I thought it was about time I got it to work. Since I have now got it working and found solutions to several small issues along the way, this post is aimed at sharing what I have found out.

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Initially the utility was only available for PCs but it is now available for various versions of the Mac operating system. My experiences reported here are all with Autoprint v2.0 on a PC running Windows XP SP2.

MIS Autoprint is available to download from MIS, free of charge.

It is simple to install – simply unzip the downloaded files, click on the Autoprint application file and follow the instructions; which, if you follow the defaults, will put the application in a folder called “MIS Autoprint” in your main “Program Files” directory and place a shortcut on your desktop. In the folder, along with the application file and instructions, are the jpeg files that it will use for automatic printing.

Autoprint uses the Microsoft Task Scheduler to print a jpeg file at a time interval that you select. Autoprint is not password protected, but it needs the authorisation of the User ID’s password to run. It will not run unless Windows is set up with a password protected User ID with administration privileges.

If you do not have a password protected PC then you can add a password to your User ID by going to the “User Accounts” control panel and setting one. If you do not want to set one for your main User ID then there is a workaround on the MIS Forum involving setting up a dummy password protected User ID, but I simply password protected my main User ID, which was probably a good thing to do anyway.

To set up an Autoprint task schedule and run a test print simply click the Autoprint desktop icon and follow the instructions – they are very clear and should not cause any problems, unless…

I run an Epson 4800 Pro inkjet printer and it is an 8 ink printer – The largest (most colours) option that came with the original download was a 7 ink option. Since the aim is to regularly exercise all the ink channels an 8 channel option seemed sensible.

Autoprint will, in fact, offer you the choice of printing any jpeg file that is in the same directory as the application file. MIS also offer a stand alone range of additional files to use (from here) which includes an 8 colour file. I simply dropped this into the MIS Autoprint folder, along with a jpeg version of a colour patch printing file I use for paper calibration (See screenshot below).

Click on the images to see them full size

And hey presto, these are now available options in Autoprint (See screenshot below).



The 8 channel ink print looks like the image below:


I don’t see any limit to the number of image files that Autoprint will offer so long as they are jpegs (it also appears to support .bmp, .ico, .emf & .wmf file formats, but I have not tried any of these and it did not work with tiff files I tried) and in the right folder (but I have not tried that many). The images supplied with Autoprint are sized to fill a US letter sized (8.5” x 11”) sheet of paper – I find that they work fine with A4 as well. I do not see any reason why you should not use a favourite photo if you prefer, so long as you are happy that it uses the full range of inks and it is sized correctly.

If you want to save some ink by printing smaller blocks of colour you can modify one of the files to make it smaller and use it instead.

Autoprint allows you to set the interval between prints (in days – 1-14 days in the dropdown menu, but it will allow you to enter more days if you wish, although I am not sure whether it actually works then, nor why you would want to go beyond 14 days…) and the exact time of day.

If you want to set up several schedules for more printers, or for the same printer but at different intervals or using different images (I have not tried this, but I can not see why it would not work) then there are instructions in the readme file to do this:

"The task that is created by the GUI can be edited to allow for more advanced schedules. However if you rename the task, then Autoprint will not find it and simply create another one.

This could be used for people with more than one printer. Basically the procedure here is to create a task with Autoprint, test it and then rename it. Then start Autoprint again and create another task for the next printer, test it and then rename it. This procedure can be repeated for any number of times to create multiple schedules."

You can edit the task name in the “Scheduled Tasks” control panel (see screenshot below) by right clicking on the task name, then “Rename”; you can also see details of the scheduled task(s) etc in the control panel (where you can also see that I use Harvey Head Cleaner).



Nearly done:
One last problem I had was that Autoprint now worked fine, but every time it wanted to print it opened the Epson Print Preview pane first and asked for permission to print – which meant that it did not print unless I said OK, rather missing the point of the whole exercise!

To solve this I went to the “Printers and Faxes” control panel; right-clicked the Epson 4800, and selected “Properties” (see screenshot below).



In the "General" tab, select the “Printing Preferences…” tab (circled in red in the screenshot below)



Then untick the “Print Preview” box (circled in red in the screenshot below). Since I shall be printing these images on plain copier paper I also selected “Plain paper” as the media type (circled in red in the screenshot below).


If you subsequently tick the "Print Preview" box in another application you may find that it stays ticked interrupting the next Autoprint - this happened to me when I printed something in Lightroom and ticked the "Print Preview" box; the next time Autoprint ran I found the purge pattern on screen awaiting my return for approval to print...

Now it all works fine!

When setting up a scheduled print I suggest you do run a test print at the end of the process as it will show up any likely problems, such as size, print previews etc. If it does not print anything it probably will not print on schedule either so it is best to sort it out at this stage.

Clearly this utility will only work if both your printer and computer are turned on when the scheduled task is due to run. In the default set up Task Scheduler will wake the computer up to run the task if it is asleep but unlike Harvey Head Cleaner it will not run the task next time the computer is turned on if it was turned off at the scheduled time for the task - or at least if there is a setting to tell it to do this I have not found it.

I have found that the 4800 is very sensitive to paper size - I often get the "Wrong paper size" warning message when using a stack of copier paper - on some sheets but not others.... Anyway this is not at all good news if you are running automated prints via Autoprint as it simply stops any printing until you clear the warning. So I simply turn it off as I can not remember actually trying to print on the wrong sized paper.

If you do not know how to do this I have posted instructions here.

I also find that plain 80gsm copier paper is prone to miss-feeding so I try to use thicker paper, such as 100gm, to avoid this problem. Again a miss-feed completely messes up the automatic process. Read more...

Someone else’s strategy for keeping their Epson Pro printer happy

Coming down off the ceiling of despair caused by my recent trials I find that on the Yahoo 4000/4800/4880 forum someone posted a solution to keeping their Epson 4000 printing after being near to scrapping it due to continued nozzle blockages. This is their strategy plus some printing utilities that might help as well.

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From ragnar22751:

Anyway, here is what has worked for me (for the last 3 weeks anyway)

1. The printer is left on

2. It's dust cover is draped loosely over it with a wet sponge in a dish placed on the left side of the paper tray. (I didn't think that liquids were a good idea as the printer would splash things around from the motion of the printer) Add water to the sponge as needed.

3. The Harvey Head Cleaner program runs a nozzle check twice daily.

4. The MIS autoprint utility is set to print the 8 color purge file every third day.

Of course it goes without saying that the printer is stuffed with standard laser print paper and not expensive ink jet art paper. I found that the nozzle checks alone were not enough to keep things clear although it did improve greatly when the printer was covered and the damp sponge was introduced.

Now that Harvey Head Cleaner works on my PC I shall give this a try – HCC’s current price is $39.99, with a free 7 day trial on request if you want to try it before buying.

The MIS Autoprint utility mentioned is another automatic printer utility (free this time) – this prints a bigger ink purge file, but I have not found their 8 ink purge - the largest option I can find is a 7 ink option. I don't use MIS Autoprint as on a Windows XP system it will not run unless Windows is set up with a user ID and password, although there is a workaround for this.

MIS offer a selection of purge files, including an 8 ink file, but I have not found that it isolates nozzles, so I simply use a colour patch file for inkjet paper calibration as a general purge file to exercise my printer when needed.

On the same forum another program called “Printer Jockey” has been recommended. This is a $99 utility that seems to do what HHC does as well as allow for individual ink channels to be cleaned, which, if it works, would really help save ink & money. I may have a look at it and decide which way to go, but at $99 with no trial period I think that I need some convincing that it really does work.

In my experience just printing blocks of colour when the nozzles are blocked does not do help clear the nozzles; that is what it looks as if Printer Jockey does - it does not say that it runs a cleaning cycle just for one channel. The YouTube tutorial seems to indicate that channel flushing is just printing through a particular colour's nozzles rather than cleaning. Anyone know any different?
Read more...