How to Unclog Your Epson EcoTank THE EASY WAY- 🚫 Sublimation Printer Issues!

if you have been having issues with your sublimation printer getting clogged then you are in the right place in today's video we're going to walk you through step by step how you can go through the process to unclock your Epson ecotank let's go ahead and get started so before we actually get into unclogging your printer I want to show you here that this one that we have on our table actually is clogged this is our Epson surecolor f170 so it's honestly it's not even a converted printer this is the printer that Epson has for sublimation but it truly doesn't matter you can see that our magenta is very clogged our black looks clogged and let's talk about what causes this so nine times out of 10 what is going to cause a clog to happen like this is you not using your printer so when we say that it is very very important that you print at least once a week if not more we truly mean it this can happen in a week time in two weeks time so even if you don't plan on pressing anything it is so important that we still use our printers at least once a week and print something off to maybe even press later now you can keep sublimation prints up to months later and still press them as long as you store them in a moisture-free area so it's very important that we do print at least once a week so that this does not happen however I understand that live happens and you cannot get around to printing once a week so that's what we are here for today is to help you unclog your eot tank and make sure that we go through the process and I can show you exactly step by step what to do and what not to do so the first thing that you're going to want to do is you're going to want to do a nozzle head check so you're going to go to your maintenance and then you're going to print a head print head nozzle check now this is not something that you have to print on sublation paper I actually advise you to do this on regular paper that way you're not wasting your sublimation paper so I'm going to just print another nozzle head check and this one I printed yesterday but I'm going to go ahead and print one again today and we're going to see if there's any difference and then we will go from there so you can see here that the black actually did better today than it did yesterday but there is still no mag at all so what it's going to ask you is it's going to have you check the printed pattern and select whether it is open or closed so we're first thing we're going to do we're going to go ahead and say that it is open so you're going to go over to the X and press okay now what it's going to do is it's going to prompt you for a print head cleaning so we do want to do a print head cleaning and after we do that then I'm going to show you how you can print a purge page and what that is is it's just a s saturation of all four of these colors to kind of get those colors saturated in the nozzle head so we're going to go ahead and click Start this will probably take about 3 to 4 minutes so we're going to let this do we're going to let this do a print head cleaning and then we will come right back so now it is done with the cleaning and it is going to prompt you to check and see if the if it needs it again so we're going to go ahead and click check we're going to print once again printing the same thing on an 8 and 1/2 by 11 to see how well that worked so you can see a huge difference from here to here and I'll show you all three side by side so we started here yesterday we got here a while ago this first print this morning and after our print head cleaning we have gotten here now there are still a there is still a little bit of a broken line there in that magenta but if you do not get this result I want to show you what to do next whether you do have breaks or you don't have brakes after your first print head cleaning I want you to click where it says yes the circle so we're just going to click okay and now I'm going to show you how you can set up your very own Purge page so that you can Purge the colors that you need to purge so here in canva I have set up a purge page with all of the colors in our printer so you have your black magenta yellow and your cyan I want to show you you can actually get the hex codes for these so black is all zeros for the hex code the magenta and take a screenshot of this if you need to so the hex code for magenta is ff00 FF that's going to get you the true magenta for yellow your hex code is going to be f f f ff00 0 and then for your cyan your hex code is going to be 00 f f FF and that is going to give you and you can create squares rectangles but these four hex codes are going to get you the colors that you need to print to purge these colors now if you notice that there is one color specifically that is clogged really bad you can set up a full Purge page and what you would do is just take that one color take it all the way across the page that way you can Purge that specific color or if you need to purge all colors I would do all four so what a purge page is going to do is it's going to print a lot of that ink so the reason behind this is because the print heads are like sponges and when they get clogged or dried up that ink has to saturate that sponge again to be able to print properly so what the purge does is it allows your printer to dump a bunch of ink in that specific color of the print head that way hopefully it'll help saturate that sponge and get that clog out so once you have ran your first print head cleaning once again you do not need to do multiple print head cleanings out of time it is not recommended at all so after you've done your first one whether you have broken lines or not come into canva set up you can do this all for free you can set up your very own Purge page and then what we're going to do is we're just going to go ahead and download that and print that on our printer and then we're just doing this at default settings right now because we are working with our sh color now if you do have a converted Epson eot tank I highly recommend that you go ahead and print this on your sublimation um settings so you want to make sure you go to your print quality and make sure that you have best quality or fine quality on there with this specific printer and let me show you on the other Epson so no matter what printer you have you want to make sure that you print on your standard sublimation settings so you want to make sure you have best quality you want to make sure your color profiles are right you want to make sure that you are printing on matte paper all of those things are very important we want to make sure those are selected because that's what we're going to be printing our sublimation transfers on um so we want to make sure that all those settings are the same so once you have done that you're going to go to print and then it is going to print your Purge page and hopefully help saturate those print heads and you can see this is what your Purge pages going to look like um very saturated with ink so after you have printed your Purge page the next thing that I would do and in all honest you guys I thought that this would be a lot harder to unclog than it was so I was thinking that I was going to be able to go through all of these steps with you but I'm going to tell you exactly what to do next so after you've done this I would do print another nozzle head check which is this page and it's going to be the first one on your screen so print another one of these check and see if you have any broken lines or not and then do a second print head cleaning now like I said earlier you do not need to run multiple print head cleanings in a row without printing a purge page and this is very very important for the life of your printer after that if you're still not getting the results that you want I would check my ink levels possibly add more ink and let my printer set for 12 to 24 hours because what's going to happen is sometimes you get air bubbles in the lines from the ink tanks to the print heads so letting that sit and letting those air bubbles kind of work their way out and then starting over um the next day it could be very important and you can even see this with this one where we started yesterday this printer had not been used in months here we are you can see there was probably some build up some air bubbles in these lines this was yesterday I let the printer set for 12 hours or more and this was my next one which again was not great but you can see a big difference especially in the black from here to here the magenta is still not showing up but after our first print head cleaning we were starting to get some results now one thing I want to make sure you all are aware of is you want to try your best to stay away from the power cleaning now power cleanings are great um when you need them but those are going to shorten the life of your printer so I don't want you to do a Power cleaning unless it's absolutely necessary that's going to be our last resort and I do want to make sure you guys are aware that if you do a Power cleaning before you start you must have at least the tank your ink tanks must be at least 2/3 of the way full so before you even start looking into doing your power cleaning make sure you have enough sublation ink to fill up your tanks if they are low that way you can fill them up and run that power cleaning if it is necessary and then of course I would continue running print head cleanings and before I did a power cleaning if this takes multiple days do not fret keep trying because sometimes these print heads get really really clogged so like I said we're going to do print head cleanings Purge pages in between our print head cleanings let your printer sit for 12 to 24 hours and then finally after a couple days if you're still not seeing results and you're still not seeing this clog come out then the last thing I would do would be to run a power cleaning what I have shown you today is going to be the same across the board for most Epson printers whether that is a converted Eco tank or a sh printer there are going to be other printers that you might have it's still going to be the same concept you're going to want to run a nozzle head check and then from there do a print head cleaning and then run your Purge Pages it may be found in different locations the concept is the same across the board if you want to learn more about sublimation make sure you click that first link down below that is going to take you to Makers going to sublimate and it is a course that we offer here at makers going to learn that teaches gives you everything you need to know about sublimation from beginning all the way to becoming a sublimation Pro if you haven't already make sure to like this video subscribe to our Channel and hit that Bell notification so that you can be notified every time we get crafty I hope this has helped solve your issue of your clogged printer and I cannot wait to see you guys in the next one