Roland SP-540 "Now Heating..." never shuts off

[IslandSignWorks]

We have a SP-540 generally works great, a few quirks but we like it. Recently we've encountered some problems, and I'm wondering if anyone has seen the same thing. When a print starts and the heater fires up, sometimes it will go into pre-heating mode and just stay there. It will say "Now Heating" on the LED and just stay there. Sometimes it will return a "Heater Time Out Error". The last time I did that, I pressed Enter and it started printing. This morning we encountered the same problem. Turning the unit off and on again seemed to clear it up, but it took 2 hours out of the day waiting for that thing to get printing.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Greg

 

[Ragnabrok]

Is the platen actually warming up? if it's still cold, something is amiss, but if it's mostly warm you can hit the pause button to skip preheating. Some models of the SP had voltage switches on the bottom of the printer, red switches for the front and back heaters. They were defaulted to 220v, so if you are in a 115v area they would take forever to heat up.

 

[w2csa]

I've had a similar problem lately with my SP300.
If I go to heat config on the front panel and reset the temps the the heaters usually will come on.
When I have this problem the platen is warm but not hot.

 

[IslandSignWorks]

Thanks for the replies. I should add that this seems to be happening first thing in the morning, then isn't so much an issue through the day.

The voltage is set at 115v, and the heaters are getting warm. I'll try hitting PAUSE to skip the pre-heating next time. We're printing stuff where the heating phase isn't critical.

This is a fairly new phenomenon on an older machine. Makes me wonder if the heater cores are getting ready to fail.

 

[jfiscus]

What temperature is the heater set to?
We used to have a problem with our Mimaki here where the heater was actually set too low.
The heater temp was set to below the ambient room temp, so the heater couldn't "cool" and the printer would await the impossible proper temperature to begin printing.