Good Morning! I didn't my Epson L3150 for colour printing for a while and now the printer only works - perfectly - when printing in black and white. The ink cartridges are nearly full except the black ink cartridge. I think the nozzles must be clogged or dried. I've already tried cleaning using the printer's cleaning key and also via the desktop using escputil -c . In both cases the test page comes out flawlessly in black and white. But in color, practically nothing comes out.
Any suggestion as to how to do a thorough cleaning of the ink nozzles?
No support from Epson for linux, of course.
A friend's Epson Eco Tank ET-2500 clogged up, because they did not use it regularly.
I stripped it down and flushed-through the tubing using water and a syringe. I also "cleared" the tubing using fine guage steel wire. Youtube videos provided the help required.
Following that we attached it to a Windows computer and purged the ink through the tubes until it printed all four colours. It still works.
At that time I was using a Brother cartridge inkjet printer. I forgot to print colour for too long and the printheads clogged up. I had a lot of work with that one, including buying "cleaning solution" kits. The result was wasted money. I could not get it to print properly again.
Now I have replaced the Brother with an Epson ET-3750 (on my cable network).
I print half a page of text each day.
The half page of text is in equal blocks of the following colours (Cyan #00ffff, Yellow #ffff00, Magenta #ff00ff, Black #000000).
I produced the document with LibreOffice Writer, and exported it as a pdf. A link to this pdf sits on my desktop.
I print half a page eachday, turning the sheet each day and using 1 3/4 sheets of paper per week.
If you disassemble your printer you may want to take photographs as you go - it makes re-assembly easier.
printer ink has a shelf life. What's the date of them or when were they installed? Are the genuine Epson cartridges or generic? Just curious. Also Epson has a nasty way of disabling printer functionality when genuine cartridges are not used. I had to capitulate by getting the genuine ones, no issues with since then.
It may simply be a matter of repeating the nozzle cleaning enough times.
One blog ( How to Clean Epson L3150 Print Head Nozzle in Detailed Steps ) indicates the author had to run the nozzle cleaning procedure eight times. Have you tried running the cleaning more than twice. It is a good idea to print the nozzle check patterns after each cleaning. If it's working, you should see gradual improvement, as shown on that webpage.
I use a Brother wireless printer, and have had a similar problem: color printing stops completely. This happens because I almost always print in black-and-white. I had to run the Brother printer's cleaning function about six times, before it started printing without gaps in the lines on the check pattern page.
It did! As I said last week, I am still trying to get rid of a bout of covid, so I was not feeling like doing anything complicated. Don't think I could, by the way. So I just used escputil -c 10 times in three different blocks, each some 3 hours apart, and that did the trick. Printer now working perfectly.
Many thanks
