My Sublimation Printer Was Clogged for Months Until I Did This

This is worse than the last time. Look at this. I was very, very, very hopeful that it was gonna do really well. Do not get discouraged when it comes to trying to unclog your printer. Okay, y'all, I heard you loud and clear. You want to know, or you want me to walk you through how to unclog your Sublimation printer. And I'm gonna be real honest, this is something that I never intended to even have to do. I don't like having to unclog the printer, but like I said in that other video, I have just let it set for way, way too long. So in today's video, I'm gonna walk you through exactly how you can unclog your Sublimation printer and some little tips and tricks along the way. If you are new here, my name is Lauren and I'm a craft producer here on the Maker's Gonna Learn channel. And today we are talking all things Sublimation. So you can see, we have our Sublimation printer here on the table. So I'm going to start the process of walking you through unclogging this. So if you're ready, let's go ahead and dive right in. So when it comes to unclogging your Sublimation printer, I'm just gonna be a hundred percent honest. Every single printer may be just a little bit different, but it's going to be the same across the board. We're going to start with a printhead nozzle cleaning. So I'm going to show you on our printer where that is located. It may not be exactly where it is located on your printer. So I highly suggest if you need to unclog, pause this video, kind of get to know your printer a little bit, and then come back here so that I can walk you through the process. So let's go ahead and go over to our printer and I'm going to show you where we find this first cleaning at in the settings. Now, before we get started, I do want to say that I have loaded this printer with regular paper. Please don't ever try to unclog your printhead nozzles or anything like that with your Sublimation paper. That's just going to be wasteful. So I have loaded just a bunch of regular paper here in our printer. Now today we are working with the Epson SureColor F170. We also have a converted printer and that may be a different video because y'all we're going to have to unclog both of them. So I'm going to walk you through where to find this. So let me bring you closer so that you can see. Here is our home screen. So we have maintenance, settings, and wifi. We are going to find this first cleaning in the maintenance setting. So I'm going to go to maintenance and now you can see we have a printhead nozzle check, printhead cleaning, and then we have a power cleaning. So the first thing that you're going to want to do is we want to do a printhead nozzle check first to see how bad it is. And then we can move into our cleaning and power cleaning. And then there's another thing that we can do if we run this cleaning that I'm going to show you that will also help unclog it. So we're going to start with our printhead nozzle check. So what this does is it prints a bunch of lines in all of the colors and you are going to look for broken lines. Y'all, I'm not kidding. I want you to look at this. This is in real time. Nothing on here is broken, but I swear to you this printer was super, super clogged before, but this looks like it's really good. So I may have to pull out the other printer and we may just go ahead and unclog that one. But what you are going to be looking for are these broken lines. Okay, so that didn't go as planned. I really thought that this would be clogged more, but good news for you is I have now pulled out the Mac Daddy printer to unclog it too. Now, here is the printhead nozzle cleaning check that I printed out for this one. So do you see the top of that yellow line right there? That is kind of what a broken line is going to look like. And honestly, this one doesn't look awful, awful for as long as it has sit, but it still needs to be cleaned and it needs to be the ink to run through. So what we're going to do, we're going to do it on this one since it needs it more, but it's the same thing. So if you have an Epson printer, whether it is your SureColor 170 or it is a converted printer, they all work very similar. So same thing with here. So what we are going to do now, you can see the screens look the same. You're going to check for the broken lines and select which one. So actually for this one, because there were no broken lines, we're just going to put the circle one. So we've selected it and it seems to be good. Now with this one, we're going to click on the X and now it is going to automatically run through the printhead cleaning. So what you need to do is click start and this process is going to take a few minutes. So it takes approximately three minutes to run this printhead cleaning and then we will see what the results look like when we come back. Oh my gosh. So the printhead cleaning has ran and I couldn't make this stuff up if I'd literally tried because this is so funny. It's worse this time than it was the last time. After we ran the cleaning, I don't know if you all can see this, but that yellow, there's like not even hardly any lines. There's more white space than there is yellow lines, which I guess if we're being honest is good for me making this video so that we can walk you through exactly what to do next. So if your printer is extremely clogged, which if you have let it set for a while, there's a good chance that it has. If you've only let your printer set for a couple months, normally just a regular printhead cleaning will bring it back to life. This one, we're going to need some more help. So what we're going to do now is we're going to go back to our printer. Let me just show you. And you can see it's once again telling us or asking us if our lines look like this or if they look straight across. I don't know guys. What do y'all think about that yellow? Looks pretty solid. I got jokes. Anyway, so we are obviously going to click the X again. And now what this is going to do is it's going to be the more powerful cleaning. So this is going to be, now you are going into a longer cleaning. So the last time it was about three minutes. If I'm not mistaken, when this pops up, it'll be about a 10 or 15 minute process to go through the, okay, nope. It still says three minutes. So I guess if this doesn't work, then we go back and do the power cleaning, which is about 10 to 15 minutes. So it's going to run it through. A stronger process of cleaning takes approximately three minutes. We'll come back when this thing prints and I'll show you the results. I really think the devil is trying to play with the church's money today because here are the results this time. There are literally no lines for yellow. Zero. Look at that. Also, the gray is starting to mess up. So now is when we do the McDaddy of cleanings. So if this is continuing to happen to you as well, before we go through and do a full like page print, which I will show you how to set up and print, after we do this, we first need to do a really, really deep cleaning. So let's go back to our printer and I'll show you. So once again, it is going to ask you, we are clicking this again. It keeps saying a more powerful one, but I am actually going to go back. Well, I guess we'll run it for the third time. Okay, so the third print test just got finished and I'm just going to turn you guys around and show you the results. So let's turn, let's flip there over. And this is, I'm just, we're just going to work down and I'm going to show you all of what we've done. So the first one we did barely had any yellow missing. You all remember this? Here is the second one. Quite a bit of yellow missing, but nothing else. Third one, no yellow at all. Gray is now messed up. And here is our most recent. The yellow has now come back, but the gray has not. So what we're going to do now is we're going to click on this. This is telling me to wait 12 hours before doing the power cleaning. Now, actually, before we do this, I'm going to try one more thing. So we're going to head over to our computer and I'm going to show you how to set up this one last hurrah if this is happening to you before we do the power cleaning, because we don't really want to do the power cleaning unless we absolutely have to. So let's go ahead and hop over to our computer and let me show you how to set up this page so that you can kind of do your own little power cleaning and we'll see how it does. Okay, so how we are going to set up this print page that's supposed to help purge all the colors is we're going to go over to Canva and we're going to come up here to create and we're going to create a new design. Now, it's very important from here that we come down here to custom size and we put in the same size as the paper that we are using, which in this printer, we're using an eight and a half by 11 piece of paper. I'm going to click eight and a half by 11 or type it in if you don't have eight and a half by 11. And from here, we are going to create what I like to call a purge page. So we are going to add in a rectangle and you can quickly add a rectangle in Canva just by hitting the letter R in case you didn't know. And we are going to start setting up our boxes. Now, these boxes do need to be the same colors and I'm going to give you the hex codes for these colors, but we need to do the same colors as what your printer has. So ours actually has six different colors for this one. It has the black, the photo black, cyan, yellow, magenta, and gray, but we're just going to do one black one because our black and photo black are not doing too bad. So the first one that we're going to do is cyan. So I'm going to come up here to the colors. I'm going to click on this little plus and I'm going to type in, this is the hex code for cyan. So it's 02FFFF, okay? That is for cyan. Then we're going to duplicate this one. We're going to bring it right next to it. We're going to now come up here to the colors and we're going to type in the one for magenta. And the one for magenta is FF00FF. Then you are just going to duplicate. And the next one that we'll do is yellow. We're going to hit that plus icon and the hex code for the yellow is FFF00. Once again, we're going to duplicate this. We're going to move this over. And then the next one we're just going to do is black. And then beside of that one, we are going to do our gray. Now the gray hex code that I am using today is going to be 808080. So these are the five that I'm doing. If your printer does not have a gray, leave that gray one out. So what I would do, if my printer didn't have a gray, I would leave that out and I would select all of these and I would widen these up so that I make it fit the whole page because we want to purge this as best as we can. So most of you all may just have a printer that has the black, cyan, magenta, and yellow. And this is what you may need. If you do have one like we have, this is what it looks like with that gray. So I'm actually going to widen this one up as well to about right there. Now, one more time, let's go over these hex codes for these colors. So for cyan, 02FFFF. For magenta, it is FF00FF. And I actually just changed that one to that. So for yellow, it is FFFF00. And then of course for black, it is all zeros. And for the gray, it is 808080. And that is how you can quickly create your very own purge page. So now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna come up here to share. I am going to download this page here and I am just going to click download. And then once that is downloaded, we'll title it purge page. We're gonna go over to our printer and we're gonna print this page. From this point, I have my purge page pulled up on my screen. Let me just turn you around so you can see. Here you go. So now I'm just going to Command P to print. I'm going to choose my Epson printer. So this is the 8550. Now I do have mine wired up so that I can make sure that it's prints right. And we are going to make sure that we come down here to printer options and we're gonna change our print quality to best quality because I just feel like that that puts out more ink. So we're just always gonna turn it to best quality and then we're gonna print and we're gonna see how well this does. So let's come over here and let's watch this guy and see how well our purge page does before we go back and do another print head check. So far, I feel like our purge page is getting that out. I feel like this is looking good but it's maybe not as yellow as it should be. So I'm kind of, I'm really excited to see. Now granted, just so you know, these colors are muted because it is a sublimation printer, y'all. If you've been, if you're here to unclog your printer, you know that these colors are muted because it's sublimation. So this yellow is not gonna be as bright as what it normally would be but I am hopeful that this is really going to help when we do another nozzle check. So here is what our full purge page looks like. That cyan and magenta and the black look really good. I still feel like we can see, I don't know if you all can see it but I feel like I can see a little bit of lines in the gray and maybe a few lines in the yellow but I think we're getting there. So what I'm gonna do, I am now going to come back over here. We're going to go back to our maintenance and we're gonna do another print head nozzle check after our purge page. So let's print that and see where we're at. Okay, so here is where we're at. The gray got a lot better. Yellow still not as much. So I think what we're gonna do now, since we have, we've done our purge page, let's go ahead and do one more print head cleaning and then if that doesn't work, then what we're gonna do is we're gonna do the power cleaning. Once again, we are getting somewhere. The gray, so much better. The yellow, getting there. So what I think I'm gonna do, I think I'm gonna print our purge page one more time and do one more print head cleaning and I really think that we're gonna be there. So let's go ahead, hop back over here. This is the thing is you have to go back and forth between your purge page, print head cleanings. Really, we really wanna try to avoid, if we can, the power cleaning. It does help if you have to do the power cleaning but we're gonna try one more time to print this purge page. So let's just go ahead and hit zero on that one like it did it. We know that it didn't, but we're gonna come back. So I'm going to print this on our 8500 series and I'm gonna come down here to printer options, right down here where it says printer setting. I'm gonna click on that I for information and our print quality is best quality. So let's print this one more time and then we'll come back. Okay, second purge page is complete and y'all look at the difference. Already in that yellow, immediately the gray also, I don't, once again, I don't know that you can see it. You can't, you can kind of see the lines there. I'm trying to hold it where you can see it on the camera. You can kind of see the lines there but look how smooth that gray looks. We are getting there. So same thing back over here, maintenance, printhead nozzle check. Let's see where we're at now. Now, while we're waiting on this printhead nozzle check to finish, one thing that I want to let you guys know, if you have found yourself here at this video and you're watching cause you're curious, but you want to learn more about sublimation, y'all, you need to click that link down below and get signed up for MGL Plus because inside MGL Plus, you get immediate access to our Maker's Gonna Sublimate course where we teach you everything you need to know about sublimation, as well as you get access to all of our cut files, all of our fonts, inside Maker's Gonna Learn, all of the education you could ever want and then some, and y'all, we have some really mind-blowing things coming out very, very soon that is going to leave you stunned. So if you're not an MGL Plus member, click that first link down below and get signed up or I'm gonna drop another link for you all below that. If you don't want to go all in on MGL Plus right now, you can sign up for our seven day trial for $7, crazy, cheaper than the price of a latte and you can get full access to our website. Plus you get 20 download credits where you can download either 20 cut files, 20 fonts, or a mixture of both and you get to keep those. So make sure that you click one of those links down below, no matter if you want to go full force into Maker's Gonna Learn Plus or you just want to try before you buy it because I get it, y'all. I am a try before I buy girl. So that's why we have our trial membership. Click one of those links down below and get signed up. But it has finished, so let's go ahead and look at what we've got. I think we've got something good. Oh, we're still getting there. So last time I'm gonna do this before I do a full power clean is I'm going to click X and we're gonna start this printhead nozzle cleaning last time before we have to do a full power clean. Well guys, the saga continues because this is worse than the last time. Look at this. Now I'm getting spots in my photo black. Okay, so we're actually, we're gonna call it quits for today. Not, I'm not gonna call it quits on unclogging this printer, promise. Pinky swear. But here's the thing. If you continually run a purge page, your nozzle check, what can end up happening is air bubbles in your printhead and sometimes it is gonna be better if you just let your printer set. So I'm going to let my printer set. I'm going to let the ink absorb into the printheads over, if I'm being honest, this is Friday. So I'm gonna let it sit over the weekend. Then I'm gonna come back on Monday and I am going to print another thing on this printer and I'm going to see how it does when it's set. Now, if it doesn't print properly come Monday, then we will run a power cleaning. So once again, this is a journey. You're coming along the journey with us. You are seeing the heartache of getting your printer unclogged. But I was very, very, very hopeful that it was gonna do really well. Because like I said, here was our first purge page and here was our second. So I think in reality, if I needed to print, it looks like it would still print pretty well. But according to our printhead checks, it's not. So we're gonna let it set. I will be back and we'll step into the power cleaning next. Okay y'all, it is now Tuesday. So it's not Monday. I ended up having other things to do on Monday. But it is Tuesday. So we have officially let our printer sit like they instructed us, but it's been longer than 24 hours. So we have let our printer sit for the rest of Friday afternoon. It was around three o'clock when I stopped trying to unclog this printer. We let it sit Saturday, Sunday, Monday. So three days we have let our printer sit to let the ink kinda catch up in the printhead to see where we're at. So now what we're gonna do is we're gonna come back over here to our printer and I'm gonna turn you around. And we are gonna go back to our settings and we're gonna go back to our maintenance and we are going to run another printhead nozzle check to see where we are at after letting our printer sit. So we are still pretty much kind of where we are the last time. So this is what was just printed. And here I have kept all of our print sheets. Let me find the last one that I did. Here was the last one that I did versus the one I did today. So we have a little bit of movement there on the yellow but we are still not there. So once again, I'm going to run one printhead nozzle cleaning here. And then after I have done that, that is when we're gonna do the power cleaning. Okay guys, I have had to run it two more times but let me show you where we're at. Here is where we are at, at all of the printhead nozzle checks and all of the cleaning. So let's go from the beginning of where we were at and where we finally got to. So here was the beginning. It really looked like nothing was wrong except we had a couple little places on our yellow. That was very, very deceiving because when I clicked X on it, saying I needed to do it again, here's where we got. So I taught you how to do a purge page. We ran a purge page and then we did a couple more. My gray started messing up here where it hadn't before. Still yellow and gray, yellow and gray, another purge page. Still yellow, gray was better. Then we got a photo, black was messed up and no yellow, photo black, yellow. Then the cyan, this was the one that when I left you all, this is where we were at. So my cyan was not working and my yellow was not working but I finally got my gray and my photo black back to where it should have been. And then finally, da, da, da, da, here is our final printhead nozzle check after a good cleaning where we are at. So pretty much I wanted to lay all of this out to show you guys, do not get discouraged when it comes to trying to unclog your printer because it's just probably gonna take you a while. Now, I still think even after this, because if we're being honest, that bottom part of that yellow is still a little bit messed up and then that top left corner, it's like it didn't print. I think a good purge page, I think we're just gonna run one more purge page here and then we will be set. Really the key to all of this is to not get frustrated when it comes to unclogging your printer. It's going to take you a few tries and you want to try your best to stay away from the power clean if you can help it. Now, there have been times where I've still had to run that power clean on our printer and it is perfectly fine. It is okay if you have to do it, but what you really need to do is run that printhead cleaning, the original printhead cleaning. If it doesn't work after a few tries and a couple purge pages, let your printer set and let it kind of catch back up. Let that ink get soaked back into those printheads and then try again because I promise you that is going to help it so much more than just immediately running that power cleaning. So we're gonna run one more purge page and then I think our printer will be good to go. Now, if you have made it this far and you haven't already, make sure you hit that thumbs up button, subscribe to our channel and hit that bell notification so that you can be notified anytime we get crafty. And y'all, if you are ready to dive into sublimation and learn everything there is to know about sublimation, make sure you click that first link down below and get signed up for either our $7 seven-day trial membership or grab an MGL Plus membership because with that MGL Plus membership, you are going to get immediate access to every single course that we have ever created. And y'all, there are a ton of courses in there, including the Maker's Gonna Sublimate course where you are gonna learn everything you need to know about sublimation. So if you haven't already, click that link down below and check us out. If you wanna learn more about sublimation, we have so many sublimation videos on our channel. Make sure to check those out. And if not, I will see you guys in the next one. Bye guys.