Cleaning Epson L3150 nozzles

Support & Help Requests Hardware
#1

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.

Running Ubuntu Mate 22.10, by the way.

#2

Hello lostados

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. :slightly_smiling_face:

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#3

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.

#4

Thank you very much. Down with covid, however, I find it almost impossible to write this, no way I could think of following your piece of advice.

#5

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.

Please let us know if multiple cleaning helps.

2 Likes
#6

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

1 Like
#7

You're welcome. Happy printing!

(Just a bookkeeping reminder to mark this topic as resolved. Thanks.)

1 Like
#8

(I tried to. How do I do it?)

#9

At the bottom of the post where I suggested performing multiple cleanings, you should see a link labeled "Solution". Just click that link.

#10

I think I did it. Too many times, perhaps: I could not see it was done. Please excuse, with covid my mind is a bit more obtuse these days...