Epson WF-7620 - Head Cleaning Gone Wrong

[Toolworker]

Our small nonprofit was given a WF-7620 that had been sitting for a while. The color alignment bars printed but the black did not print at all.

I got a cleaning kit with fluid and syringe and went through the cleaning. Following a suggestion I saw online, I did all the heads even though the color ones seemed OK.

Now nothing prints at all. The color cartridges were all low, so I put in new ones. I ran several cleaning cycles, and did a few copies of densely printed pages, but still nothing at all prints.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[mikling]

You should not have used a printhead cleaning kit. It is not unusual for this class of printer to suddenly go blank if sitting for a while. You should simply have performed multiple head cleanings and checked each time. Do at most 3 consecutively and then let it rest for a few hours.
When sitting idle air can migrate up into the printhead and then it will have nothing to print. Performing a head clean will just pull ink through the system and fill back up the nozzles so that it can print again.
No need to worry about head cleaning on these models as they have user replaceable waste ink/maintenance tanks. So ignore the warnings about too many head cleanings from old posts on Epsons.
Just put the ink back in and do some head cleanings.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

Are you using Epson or 3rd party cartridges ? Did you remove the stickers covering up vent holes - mainly on 3rd party cartridges ?

 

[Toolworker]

Are you using Epson or 3rd party cartridges ? Did you remove the stickers covering up vent holes - mainly on 3rd party cartridges ?

Epson, and yes, I removed the stickers.

 

[Toolworker]

You should simply have performed multiple head cleanings and checked each time. Do at most 3 consecutively and then let it rest for a few hours.

Thanks for your advice. After several head cleanings, the head cleaning printout began to show some printing - about 50% of the lines in black, maybe 1/3 for cyan and magenta, and nothing from yellow.

I tried putting a Windex-soaked paper towel under the heads for an hour, which drew out a lot of ink and improved things just a little.

Then I did 5 or 6 more cleanings, and on each one the lines extended but just a tiny bit. At this rate I would have to do about 20 - 30 cleanings to get full coverage - and still nothing yellow. And so far this has used up about half a set of ink cartridges.

 

[berttheghost]

Wait as much as a day between cleanings. Patience pays;hourly cleanings only waste ink.Diffusion of solvents into dried ink is a slow process.

 

[Toolworker]

Wait as much as a day between cleanings. Patience pays;hourly cleanings only waste ink.Diffusion of solvents into dried ink is a slow process.

Thanks. Because of the office schedule, we can only clean on at most three days a week, Wednesday through Friday. Is it a problem to let it sit 5 days between cleanings?

How many cartridges do I empty into the waste tank before I have to worry about replacing it?

And here's a meta-question. We got an Epson only because it was donated to us. Would we be better off just spending the time and ink cartridge money to get an HP instead, that might be better suited to our occasional office printing and less of an ongoing maintenance problem?