Print shop guy in Austin warned me about my black ink swap and he was dead on
I was burning through black ink way too fast on my Epson, so I switched to a cheap third party cart to save about $40 a month. The guy at the shop on Burnet Road told me to keep at least one OEM cart in there or my nozzles would clog up within a month. I ignored him, figured he just wanted my money, and ran the cheap stuff for six weeks straight. Now I'm staring at a head that prints nothing but streaky gray and a cleaning cycle that eats ink without fixing anything. Has anyone here actually saved a clogged head without buying a whole new printer?
Learned that same lesson the hard way a few years back, except I ran cheap ink for almost three months and killed a Canon that way. Tried every trick in the book to save it, warm water soaks, alcohol swabs, a syringe full of cleaner, and none of it brought the head back. Once those nozzles sit clogged that long the dried ink turns into basically cement inside the channels. You can sometimes save it if you catch it early, but six weeks of streaky gray means yours is probably done.