 Hi, this is Kevin. Today, we talk about how many times should you run this building head cleaning functions from Epson. We're running too many times damage to my printer. Should I wait two hours between every run? And normally, how many times does it take to clean a clock? We just started talking about how different printers clean their printhead. This is an integrated printhead, which is the cartridge and the printhead in building one unit. HP and Canon use those kind of printhead. So you put the electricity on those ribbons and the ink spilt from the nozzle underneath. To clean the printhead, it uses the electricity to heat up the ink inside the cartridge to expel ink. This is the nozzle and you have two heating elements goes in and you gather some ink here. So when you heat it up, you boil the ink, it creates a bubble which you squirt in and out. So if the thing is totally empty, the HP and Canon integrated cartridge doesn't have a mechanism to suck in and out. So basically what you do is you try to heat it up the elements. And if you're lucky, you still get some ink out here, so you can squirt ink out. However, if you're totally empty, you basically just keep reheating these elements. So that's why you shouldn't do too much cleanings. And why somebody suggest you do like two or three cleanings and just leave it for a couple hours? As maybe after a couple hours, you get some ink coming in, then you can do the bubble again. That's the reason if you have integrated cartridges, you should not do too much cleanings using the printer's building function. And for those of you who have integrated cartridges, it's recommended to have a third-party tool like this. You can see that basically it has a rubber pad, you put it on, then you suck the ink from the bottom. And this is the best way and the non-intrusive way to clean an integrated cartridge with HP and Canon. I don't know why they don't include this kit when they sell the cartridge. You have those new HP cartridges, it doesn't have the printhead. Those are not integrated cartridges. How does the printer clean this? So basically inside the ink is held inside, then you have a hole in which the printer blows air into it. Just have a cartridge here, and here's the outlet. And you can ink in here, then you have a bladder which is flat. And then when you do the cleaning, the printer blows air into the bladder and then that will squeeze the ink out. So this way you do need to heat up the printhead, which is good. However, you get another problem as, imagine this is the cartridge. And then we go to the printhead. The printhead's nozzle is tiny, tiny nozzle. So you have this typical problem. You have a tiny opening here, you get a large opening here, and you get fluid. And you press this to get ink out of here. What's your problem? If you remember your high school and you get a Pascal's principle. And this is exactly how the hydraulic jack works. Instead, you are not jacking a car from the little end to the bigger end. Instead, you are using a car to jack up the smaller end. And so it'll be difficult. So how's Epson CleanIt? Epson actually clean exactly the same way as this. So it has a printhead. Underneath the printhead, it has a divided rubber pad. It depends on how many of the nozzles you have. Some of you have one or some of you have two. There's a rubber chamber to capture the printhead. And underneath, there's a pump. It sucks the ink out of here and dumps it out to the waste pad. So basically, this is the most advanced, the best way to clean your printhead. However, you often see if you do two or three cleanings, it doesn't help you at all. And sometimes the second, the third cleaning printer becomes even worse. How can you be worse than you started? The reason is this. Although Epson has a good idea, it doesn't have a good contact between this and the printhead. To get a good sucking, you have to run multiple, multiple times to get one time that it actually sucked. And this is why sometimes your second one is worse than the first one. Because the first one, so basically Epson cleaning has three functions. One is shaking, shaking the carriage, try to shake the ink. Then I use a rubber wiper to wipe the printhead. It's kind of like a windshield wiper, a wipe underneath to make sure that you don't have anything underneath here. The third one is sucking. And this is the one, I think it doesn't always do that. It only do it a couple times. So if you have a three cleaning, you might only have one of them. Actually do the sucking. Therefore, the result will be the same or even worse. Here's a top-down view of the underneath the printhead. You can see this is a rubber wiper, a wipe the bottom of the printhead. Here's the rubber chamber and attached the bottom of the printhead and suck it with a pump underneath. To be able to suck effectively, you need this little sucker to come up strongly against the bottom of the printhead. So Epson designed this sort of escalator, a white plastic on the right. However, I don't think it's strong enough. That's why the sucking is not always done. So basically, I think Epson has a sucker erection problem. To show you how it works, I'm going to borrow the video from another project, which is a continuing ink system. Here there's a tube coming into the printhead. You can see it's white now because it's filled with air. Just imagine there's a huge bubble inside the printhead that you want to get rid of. So we're going to run the cleaning, see how many times we can suck ink into the printhead and how many times we need to run to have a perfect nozzle check. And now it's wiping the printhead. You can see the first cleaning only did the first two functions. It did not suck ink, so those tubes still empty. Now let's do the second one. Still not sucking. Okay, finally get some colors. You can see there's still air bubbles in the magenta color. So I bet it won't print perfectly. If I tap on it, you can see the air bubble get dissolved back into the ink. This is exactly why the Epson water-shaked cartridge during the cleaning. Remember the air bubbles in the magenta color? So now you can see that the magenta still need sucking. You thought it's going to be easy, didn't you? Actually, it didn't do any sucking this time either. Many people may already give up after third and fourth try. Actually, what you should do is just keep on clogging. Almost there. Guys, it takes about eight cleanings. How many will clean one more? This is when it seems you're making things worse. Don't worry, just keep going. Okay, 11 times is a charm. Perfect. So the next thing you'll do is just keep printing a page every day and at least print a page every day. So just maintain this printer and you shouldn't be doing so much cleaning. I hope you enjoyed this video. Visit us at www.bchtechnologies.com or locally at Greensboro, North Carolina. Cheers!