L560 - Yellow nozzles seem to clog fast?

[Dukenukem117]

When running the force drop test, I've noticed that my yellow nozzles seem to get very high values relative to the others. All the other nozzles are between 0 to 20, but yellow is 131 and 101. The odd thing is that both the yellow printheads are the least used with only about 6-700 mL of use, whereas some of the other printheads are pushing 4000mL. The ink isn't expired either, and most of the cartridge is still full.

I don't know what's a healthy value range for the drop test, but this seems unusually high compared to the other colors. Any ideas why?

 

[Dukenukem117]

It very well could be due to low usage... I'll have to check my 560 and report back. For me, light magenta never gets used. I replaced a cartridge that was 1/2 full because it was expired, and it was expired the last time I replaced a different cart, and the time before that...

I run a printhead cleaning almost every day to try to mitigate this. But the weird thing is that prior to my last print run, it was giving me numbers around 50. After the run (which looked fine) - the nozzles are now reading over 100.

 

[netsol]

they say the yellow has more solids in suspension than any color other than black

on my one roland the yellow always tends to clog

 

[Dukenukem117]

Ok, so after replacing the maintenance cartridge and doing a cleaning, the yellow is back down to <50. It still has the highest value of all the colors (everything else is <20), but that seems to have been the culprit. The really strange thing is that the maintenance cartridge was reading 100% when I replaced it, but the new one is reading 100% as well. The old was definitely not brand new and had a lot of ink inside. I wish HP would make it more clear if the usage is counting up or counting down for things like the maintenance cartridge and maintenance kits.

 

[P Wagner]

Maintenance Cart counts down from 100-percent. SMKs count up to 100-percent

 

[Dukenukem117]

Maintenance Cart counts down from 100-percent. SMKs count up to 100-percent

Any idea why the very used old cartridge would still read 100%? Are the cartridges chipped or does the printer just assume that a new one is always a brand one one?

 

[balstestrat]

Hmm, I suppose they are not chipped. But that makes no sense since every other aspect of the printer is...

Not chipped but they have black lines printed on them that the line sensor reads to know the status of the cleaning roll. By time you can see the black line moving along the width of the cleaning roll.
If an old used one would be read as new, then there is an issue with the line or the line sensor is dirty.