http://www.ddisoftware.com/qimage-u

v2015.125    May 19, 2015

Priority: Low

v2015.125 offers the ability to schedule unattended unclog prints for multiple printers!

Mike

Only a masochist would suffer two or more printers

I to have been having fun with Unclog Sched.  (a great feature by the way)

With Mike's detailed video setting it up was a dream.

But being a masochist myself I have just about worked out a scheme to wake up computer from hibernate, let Qimage run the unclog, and then hibernate the comp. again, every day of the week.

I have used a free prog   WakeupOnStandBy (WOSB)    www.dennisbabkin.com/wosb/ 

No doubt it is just using what is already built into Windows but I got in a mess in that area.

I will do more testing later and report if any body interested.

Jeff

Reporting results.

Set up unclog to run daily and ran to destruction.

After about 5 or 6 days started to get jets showing clogs.  Suspect air in system.
continued to run to destruction until all jets well and truly failed.
Took out the cis 'cartridges' and cleared all the air locks and commenced to head clean to get ink flowing.
Printer then reported some carts empty so went through the chip resetting procedure.
Sods law then made an appearance, the chip resetting failed and no efforts to reset were successful.

So 'SOD' it, un-installed the cis gear and put in the orig. Epson Carts. Worked fine but the carts soon recorded empty.

Got a new set or genuine Epson carts and away we went.
Got all jets working after a couple of cleans except the Magenta.  Many Unclogs just Magenta no effect. numerous cleans no effect. Pushed through some cleaning fluid and slowly got some lines showing on the Head Checks.

A few more cleans and Unclogs and got success.

By now most of the new carts are showing very low ink levels, so another cart order required.

Conclusions and observations

Printing now OK but all the paper profiles are useless, indicating that the cis ink is not the same spec. as Epson.  (Epson manage colour working quite well)
The weak point of the CIS would appear to be the seating of the 'cartridges' there was no means of clipping them in securely. (the cis system had pipe clamps on the pipes to prevent air back flowing in, the instruction was to clamp off the pipes if doing no printing for 3 days or so.  Leaving them open showed that this was in fact an actual problem. 
The chip resetting was never very good, I rarely got a full reset even after two or three attempts.
The plastic piping was also giving trouble, I think it had got softer and fatigued with age and was dropping down and jamming the print head at the end of left hand travel and I ended up with extra brackets and masking tape support for the piping, but this only lasted a few weeks before requiring resetting.

When it worked it was fine and produced good prints at low cost.

Now hand in pocket for another set of cartridges.

 

Jeff

 



 
 

       
     

My CIS experience has been similar to Jeff's.  I've been running InkjetFly CIS on my R1900 for a little over a year now.  If I don't print at least every other day, I'd always get clogs, mostly in magenta.  Scheduling unclog patterns that print nightly managed to extend that to about a week but eventually, after about a week, I'd start to see missing lines in the magenta, sometimes yellow, and rarely cyan.  Found out that the ink level in those carts was very low even though the tanks were 1/3 to 1/2 full.  My first solution was to pull the tiny plug off the top of the carts themselves, and top the actual carts off with ink.  Then it'd work for another ~week.

Recently I believe I stumbled onto the permanent solution.  In doing some research on "constant pressure" tanks that have two compartments (basically one for ink and one for air), the "relative ink level" is actually the bottom of the tank or close to it.  That means that if the tubes coming out of the tanks were open and not connected to carts and you held them lower than the bottom of the tanks, ink would run out.  If you hold them higher than the bottom of the tanks (even though that might still be lower than the top of the actual ink level), ink will actually flow backwards back into the tanks.

What I did was I raised my tanks another couple inches so that the bottom of the ink tanks was about the same vertical height as the middle of my carts.  In other words, if you draw a horizontal line from the bottom of my tanks, that line would intersect about halfway between the bottom of the carts in the printer and the top of the carts in the printer: the "half full" mark on the carts in the printer.  In theory, that should leave you with at least a half cart of ink and the ink level in the carts shouldn't drop below about half full.  In addition, it shouldn't overfill the carts and leak out: trust me, it does leak out if you set the bottom of the tanks higher than the top of the carts so be sure not to go too high with the tanks!   Sure enough, once I set the bottom of the external tanks to mid-cart level, I have had no further clogs in about a week and I'm not getting any leaking out the printhead.

Now, with all that said, I should say that this tank level is much higher than what is recommended by InkJetFly.  They recommend raising the tanks about 1.5 to 2 inches above where the printer is sitting (the desk as it were).  Mine are currently set to about 3.5 inches off the desk.  So as a disclaimer, I should say that while this method worked for me, I'm still "testing it" so I can't recommend that everyone do this and ignore the CIS instructions.  At this time, I'm only telling you what worked for me and the above seems to have solved the issue where my carts eventually run dry even with plenty of ink in the external tanks.  I should mention that I still print daily unclog patterns to keep ink flowing, but that combined with setting the tank level seems to have solved or at least greatly reduced my CIS troubles.

Even with the trial and error getting the CIS optimized over the last year, I still really enjoy it and even with all the wasted ink figuring this out, it is still orders of magnitude cheaper than Epson carts!  And for me, being a bit of a gearhead, it's fun to play with too!  Interestingly, I've only gotten ink on my fingers when I clean the actual printer/head/wiper which isn't a CIS issue per se.  

Mike

Jeff,
Cut your losses and buy an R2000, 17ml cartridges, a set of genuine Epson for £22.9
http://tinyurl.com/p9wjnc9
It's not usually worth buying inividual ones at that price! Cyan gets the most usage.
Terry

Jeff,
As a follow up, I asked Terry, (very smart engineer) to see if he could break down the cost of ink per 8 x 10 print.

He did some mumbo jumbo with milliliters of ink times the sq. millimeters of printable area, factoring humidity and bad breath, divided by a centipede squared, and came up with 15 cents a sheet (8 x 10) for me, and 17 pence for him due to cost of ink a tad higher in the UK.  (A4 paper)
So if I take a guess that printing an Unclogger full sheet once a day or every other day keeps my head clean, that will cost me 15 cents a day at most.
Far less than running a head cleaning cycle 2 or 3 times to get the heads working again.

Fred