Epson P900 Print head moving slowly

[Peteprints]

Something has happened to my Epson P900 printer and now print jobs print excruciatingly slow. The print head travels at probably 25% of the speed it normally did.

What happened to cause this? Absolutely nothing as far as I can tell.

I was printing as normal, on roll paper, one after another with no issue. It became late so I paused my print que, went to bed and resumed in the morning.

It the morning it began printing incredibly slow, the print head making a pass, pausing each time for a few full seconds before heading back. Needless to say, it takes an unacceptable amount of time to print something now.

Nothing has changed with any print or printer settings, paper type, anything. It's seemingly out of the blue.

Very frustrating. I'm printing for my business nearly everyday, and this speed is untenable.

Please help with any suggestions!

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

Are you printing a lot with that printer ?

WicReset does not really support the P900 but it may be possible to do a read out the last error codes - give it a try and run the status report - it will report the last 5 error conditions and a brief explanation in most cases.

I see an Epson printhead moving slowly at startup when it is scanning the coding strip - the small gray plastic band which stretches behind the printhead carriage along the print path, this strip gets spoiled from ink fog under the top cover and needs cleaning from time to time with a small piece of kitchen towel and some drops of a window cleaner.

 

[Peteprints]

Thanks for the reply. I am printing at a high volume on this printer. I will investigate cleaning the coding strip for future maintenance.

I may have narrowed down my issue... I'm finding that the print head is capable of moving at the normal speed. So it doesn't look to be a mechanical issue (thank you print gods).

When a print job begins, the first three or four passes are completely normal. Then it begins to pause for a few seconds between each pass. The majority of the print proceeds at this slow speed, before resuming normal for the last few passes of the image.

It seems to me like it's "thinking" before each pass, causing the slow down, leading me to believe it's a data issue, or my wifi signal...

So although I've noticed no problems with wifi on any other device in the house, I reset my modem and router and the slow printing problem is no more. It could be a fantastic coincidence, or a problem within my wifi signal was the issue all along.

Back to normal for now. Thank you for offering some help!

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

Thanks for the feedback - the WiFi connection/performance is a pretty overlooked item when trying to analyse such problems.