Guide: safe waste pad counter reset
Total time: 20–40 minutes. Difficulty: medium. Follow the exact order: every step exists for a reason.
The 9 steps
- Identify the lock. The message “parts inside your printer have reached the end of their service life”, alternately blinking lights or an E‑11 error confirm the counter has hit its limit. The printer stops printing as protection.
- Perform the physical maintenance. Locate your model's absorbent pad or maintenance box/tank. Remove it, pressure-wash it until water runs clear, dry it thoroughly and refit it; or replace it with a new one; or route the outlet to an external tank. This step is mandatory: the reset only erases the number, not the accumulated ink. If the box has a chip with metal contacts, replacing it with a new one or resetting that chip is what unlocks the printer; step 7 does not talk to the chip.
- Prepare the connection. Use a USB cable straight to the computer (avoid hubs) or put the printer on the same Wi-Fi network. Power it on and close any Epson utilities and pending print jobs. On Windows it helps to restart the Print Spooler service.
- Download and verify the tool. Go to the download page, pick the option for your system and check the hash against SHA256SUMS.txt, published at the site root. When in doubt, build from source.
- Read the current counter. Every tool offers a safe read mode (it writes nothing). Write the values down: useful to confirm the problem and keep history.
- Back up the EEPROM. Before writing, export the backup the tools provide (backup-*.txt file or snapshot). Keep it: it restores the original state if something goes wrong.
- Run the reset. Confirm the operation when prompted. A good write answers OK byte by byte; if you see NG, abort: the key does not match your exact model and you must not retry blindly.
- Power cycle. Turn the printer off with its physical button, wait 10 seconds and turn it on again. Without this cycle, the change will not take effect, even after a successful reset.
- Verify and log. Read the counter again (it should show 0%), print a test page and note the date. Depending on the model the counter fills up again between 5,000 and 50,000 pages: write it down to anticipate the next maintenance.
Common problems
It does not detect the printer over USB
Close Epson Status Monitor, restart the Print Spooler service (services.msc), try another cable or port (a motherboard-direct USB 2.0 port is best) and run the tool as administrator.
Network/Wi-Fi connection fails
Make sure PC and printer share the same subnet, set a fixed IP on the printer and allow UDP 161 (SNMP) in the firewall. Recent firmware may block SNMP: use USB instead.
Write rejected (:42:NG)
The write key does not match your exact model. Check the full model on the label (L3159 ≠ L3150) and force manual selection (--model). Do not retry in a loop.
No USB permissions on macOS
Install libusb (brew install libusb) and temporarily remove the printer from System Settings → Printers & Scanners while using the tool.
The error persists after the reset
Do a full power cycle: unplug for a minute and reconnect. If it persists, read the counter again: some models keep a copy elsewhere in memory and need the write repeated. If the internal counter already reads 0% and the error remains, check whether the maintenance box has a chip: these tools do not reset it.
Agents and automation
If you ask an agent to prepare the reset, this is the half it can do on its own and the half it must not: the write and the physical maintenance belong to a person.
The harness is a single Node file, with no install and no dependencies. Agents download it from here: /agent/ewr-safe.mjs
curl -fsSLO https://padreset.com/agent/ewr-safe.mjs
curl -fsSLO https://padreset.com/agent/ewr-safe.mjs.sha256
node ewr-safe.mjs inspect --model L365
node ewr-safe.mjs prepare --model L365 --out ./padreset-out
node ewr-safe.mjs share --plan ./padreset-out/ewr-plan.jsonIt needs Node (tested on 22 and 26) and EWR installed, which is listed on the download page: the harness does not talk to the printer, EWR does; this half only drives it in read-only mode.
An agent can do this alone
- Identify the printer over USB and read the current counters, without writing anything.
- Save the EEPROM backup first and tell you where it went.
- Check whether the reset is worth doing: if the counter sits far below its limit, resetting only erases the number and empties nothing. On 809 of the 1337 resettable models a pad that the reset clears has no counter to compare, and there the printer answers: a 16/44 error is enough on its own to say that it is full, and no error means unknown, not empty.
- Simulate the write and hand you the exact command, with the bytes it would change.
- After the power cycle, read again and tell you whether the reset took effect, comparing against what was going to be written.
- Package the run into a single file with the serial number and the paths redacted, so the same reading can be requested from another printer without asking anyone for personal data.
A person has to do this
- Step 2: wash, replace or reroute the pad. Without it, the reset fixes nothing.
- Step 7: run the write. It is the only irreversible step, and the call is yours.
- Step 8: switch the printer off and on with the physical button.
Limits worth knowing
- The flow is USB only: there is no network version, so a Wi‑Fi‑only printer is out of reach.
- The tools on the download page carry no telemetry and send nothing to third parties; the backup stays on your machine.
- Honest note: PadReset has tested this read, backup and check sequence on two models (an L365 and an L6490, the second with no readable pad counter at all), and on 2026-10-02 it ran the full cycle —write included— on an L365 whose pad counter sat at 100%: EWR wrote, the power cycle confirmed it, and the byte-for-byte check against the backup came back applied. The write is still left to a person on purpose: it is the only irreversible step.