Epson stylus photo 825 clogged print head woes
I don’t recall if I’ve mentioned my Epson stylus photo 825 before, but I’ve had one for a couple years. The really nice feature (I thought) was the ability to print direct from camera memory cards (at the time I bought it, this was much more rare than in current printers.) Anyway, it had GREAT print quality and could print up to the edge of the paper. Unfortunately, I use my laser printer (monochrome hp 4p) for 95%+ of my day to day printing and the epson sat unused for stretches of time and eventually I’ve wound up with a bunch of jets clogged on the print head. I’ve been taking increasingly drastic steps to try to get the thing to print well again.
Windex is a main ingredient as a cleaner. From what I hear alcohol based cleaners are bad news for the print heads and can lead to corosion, so ammonia based is what we want. Most of the tutorials suggest taking a syringe of sorts and dropping a few drops of windex on the cleaning pad, turning the printer off and let it sit overnight. Tried that and made a bit of progress, but still bunches of clogs…. so the next step was carefully apply to the “posts” that make contact with the ink cartridge holes. At first I did take the careful 2-3 drops approach and after over a weeks worth of such sessions I’m getting a bit less careful with it. No, I’ve managed to surround the post with the syringe and just pump windex through the jet. I’ve had the printer out where I could work on it for about 2 weeks now and had put in a good 12 hours working on it before moving to the more aggressive cleaning style. And yes, it still had m any clogs. Enough that there was fair streaking in image prints.
So…. now I’m at a point where I’ll either kill or cure with the most aggressive approach… take the print head out and let the head portion soak in windex (nothing to lose at this point.) I’ve forced windex through all the spikes and still see clogs, so now it’s just a matter of leaving it in the windex to see if that works. In the meantime I have an old hp that someone had just recently replaced that I plugged in and is working nicely (in spite of no printing in several weeks.) I’m going to be curious to see if that one holds up better under low use patterns. (Probably – lower resolution, larger jet openings.)
Anyway…. this had me looking at the possibilities of a color laser printer. I know… for pictures they can’t beat a good inkjet, but for cost/page and NOT CLOGGING THE INK NOZZLES they have inkjets beat hands down. The Konica Minolta Magicolor 2530 Dl Color Laser looks really good (great marks for the color image quality….) AND it’s being sold for ~$290 – I know some would complain at the 4 ppm color output, but my monochrome laser does 4 ppm… no problem.
Anyway… .probably not quite the moment for the color laser for me, but it’s worth keeping in the back of the mind as an option.
By the way, it’s possible to buy print heads for the epson photo stylus 825…. the part number is F083010 Although… one place has the print head for $151 and another (here) has them for $99…. which seems a bit steep for a replacement part on a printer that was originally ~200 if I recall correctly… I might be better off finding a used epson (without clogs….) or just putting that towards a laser printer………………….. that would go 1/3 of the way…