bvbellomo wrote:
What is weird is I went a long time without printing and the printer worked fine. But then, the more frequently I used it, the faster it clogged.
Did you agitate the ink cartridges after sitting for a long time. The pigments can settle and cause issues if left alone for long times.
Sorry…but it is not theory but a fact that pigment ink settles out if it is not agitated. Not only can this settling lead to clogs, but it can also affect the colours.
Not only should one agitate ink cartridges that sat idle in the printer for some time, but one should also agitate pigment ink cartridges when installing new.
chez wrote:
Sorry…but it is not theory but a fact that pigment ink settles out if it is not agitated. Not only can this settling lead to clogs, but it can also affect the colours.
Not only should one agitate ink cartridges that sat idle in the printer for some time, but one should also agitate pigment ink cartridges when installing new.
This is true. From the Epson P900 user manual (page 97):
"Note: For best printing results, use up a cartridge within one year of opening the package. Epson
recommends removing and shaking the ink cartridges once every six months."
Short version: you'll get to use about 80% of the ink from the initial P900 cartridges, but you'll have to replace them long before you've used even 40% for printing.
Long version:
I suspect that you'll find the P900 clogs more easily than the older printers, unless you use it often enough. Mine (actually a P906, for the Australian market) has bitten me two summers in a row when the dry and/or heat caused multiple heads to clog in less than a week since the previous print. I recommend running nozzle checks at least weekly all year if you can, and more often in very dry conditions.
The P906/P900 will drain more than half of the ink from the initial cartridge set during setup. That's mostly ok because much of the ink is still ready to be used but is in the ink tubes rather than the ink cartridges. However, two side effects are
(1) that the waste tank is almost filled on day 1 (which is why you get a spare one with the printer). I think about the equivalent of two cartridges got flushed, but it was shared equally across all ten cartridges.
(2) the initial cartridges will subsequently empty without you doing a whole lot more printing, so even though there is still plenty of ink in the system (ink tubes) you will need to replace the initial cartidges relatively quickly. If you don't then you might get air in the system and need to flush it all again (or else it will simply not let you print).
One thing I do not like about the Epson system is that you cannot test / flush specific colour channels when there is a blockage; it's either all of them at once (wasteful) or none of them. You can waste a lot of ink in healthy channels to clear just one blocked colour. There seems to be no software that can set the printer to print with specific inks; e.g. using only the cyan without using any of the light cyan nor traces of other colours.
A long time ago I had a Canon 24" printer. It was clever enough to regularly agitate the 80mL ink tanks automatically while the printer was in stand-by mode. It also lasted weeks between prints but that might have been because the summers there were humid rather than dry, and because I did not have reverse-cycle airconditiong.
