We have an Epson 820 color printer connected to a Mac G-3 B/W. Its about a year old. We use it pretty frequently and use the self cleaning feature fairly often, maybe once every two weeks.
We used an off-brand cartridge last time we changed. We weren’t very happy with it, so two days ago, changed back to Epson’s.
I tried printing this morning and couldn’t.
I did a head check and found black and blue to be clogged. I did the cleaning, and blue cleared up but black was still not flowing. Cleaned again and every thing was worse. Again and again…worse and worse.
Is there any thing else I can do? Did using the off brand of ink do this? We did find it needed cleaning more often with the off-brand. Would mixing two different brands, both made for this printer, cause a reaction, making the ink “gel”?
Thanks, in advance, for any suggestions, help or encouragement. 
My advice is to take your Epson 820 printer to an Authorized Epson Service Center to have it cleaned properly. If it was still in warranty, you probably voided that because of using 3rd party ink cartridges. Anyway, they will clean it up and tune it properly.
Given that you can buy a brand-new Epson 820 for $75, I’m not sure that having it serviced makes much sense. Just having it cleaned will probably run around $50, and if they have to replace any parts, you’re in the hole.
Not true, according to the Moss-Magnuson Act.
But no doubt the company servivce center will try to tell you this.
Your problem sounds like a saturated ink-pad. Epson printers have a little sponge where they dump the ink during self cleaning. When that sponge becomes saturated with ink, you’ll have the problems you describe. You probably need to clean it. You also have to clean
Also, see this thread http://www.fixyourownprinter.com/printer/17/16008.html and in particular this post:
Generally, self-cleaning should not be performed, unless streaks of ink appear on the prints. It is just a waste of ink.
This is the one thing I dislike most about Epson printers – the print head is not accessible. At least HP printers give you a fresh print head with each expensive cartrige!
Now for my super secret method of cleaning my own Epson printer heads (do this at your own peril):
- Press the “change cartridge” button to position the print head in the middle.
- Disconnect the power. The print head should now be free sliding back and forth.
- Dampen a few layers of folded up tissue paper and place it in the well below the print head.
- Slide the print head back and forth a few times, making sure that the head crosses over the damp tissue paper.
- Remove tissue and turn it back on. You are ready to go.
Note: My printer is a Epson Stylus Photo 785EPX, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this method works with other Epson printers.
It takes a bit of experimentation to get the amount of tissue just right. Once you do, you will see immediate results: the tissue will become multicolored as it picks up the ink from the head.
This method has never failed to get severly-clogged heads clean for me.
There’s a bit of freeware you can get here for Epson printers that enables all sorts of things, including undocumented extra-intensive clkeaning cycles and resetting of ink counters (the cartridges can sometimes report being out of ink before they really are and the printer will just stop printing entirely when it thinks the head cleaning sponges are full). I’ve had great results from it, but use it entirely at your own risk.
That sounded great, but alas, as I said, I have a Mac, so I can’t use the freeware. 
Early Out That was my thought. It seems there’s a sale somewhere all the time. Why aren’t they free yet? 
minor7flat5 I’ll try that.
Dog80 I’ll try that too,
Thank you all. 
Oops - sorry, I missed that bit.
If you end up replacing the printer, may I recommend moving away from Epson (just my opinion, you understand) - most of the other printer manufacturers have a different design for their ink jet models - the print head is incorporated with the ink cartridge - the worst case scenario in the case of irreparably blocked nozzles is simply cured by replacing the ink cartridge. I personally recommend HP.
We had an HP previously and hated it. It just didn’t interface with the Mac easily, even though it had Mac software.
We did a little research on that aspect before buying this, and found that Epson seems to be most compatible with Mac. Unfortunately, we didn’t check on ease of maintainance
You can buy super-duper Epson head cleaner on Amazon or Ebay.
I’ve never not been able to unclog a head, but it can take many hours, and lots of messy, wasted, expensive ink.
Epson’s have the best print quality, but they are way too prone to clogging. I finally gave up, and just started using Walmart or CVS for printing photos, which is not only much higher quality, but cheaper. I use a color laser for non-critical color work (which is 99% of what I do).
Almost seventeen years later and printers still suck. Ugh.
Wow.
How did that happen?
It came up in my “feed” - I had no idea it was a really, really old zombie.