Printer Cartridge update 2

Remember my post on refilled cartridges back over a year ago, shortly after I published the post the ink went dry and this time in month of August I went ahead and bought new cartridges. 

I am happy to say, they lasted almost 14 months, they went dry couple of days ago. In the end of this experiment, my conclusion is refilling a cartridge is worth while once, twice or max thrice beyond that one is better off buying new cartridges. 

Refilled printer catridge update

A friend of mine said "a blog just is someone's opinion and may not always be a well researched truth", being a blogger I have to agree with him. For I myself am guilty of posting something on my blog and not providing an update to the same when the information I know about the matter changes. I can quote numerous examples, but I do take the credit for one case that of Lance Armstrong where I did come a full circle.

Anyways, I started this post because I wanted to update about the ink cartridges, remember the cartridge refill post? 

I followed the instructions from the website and was printing every week without fail the "printer status report" only to notice at the end of 3 months one of the cartridge went empty and promptly I got it refilled, only to notice that the other colors went empty within a couple of days. The surprising part was they went from all good to no good in more a binary transition than an analog one, as I expected them to be. 

One small thing I learnt is, just because the material I am printing is black and white doesn't mean the printer is using the black cartridge unless I specify to print black and white it would rarely use the black. 

This time around I am trying to keep the status reports more sporadic than fixed, so far 3 months over and the cartridges are still alive. Will have to see how long will they last. 

I personally don't have a feel for how long will the brand new ones last, will try that experiment just to see if the refill route is the cheaper way to go. 

Refilled printer cartridges

For my hp inkjet printer at home, every time the ink dried up I used to buy brand new cartridges and some time along while printing some photos at Costco, I realized they have a service to refill the cartridges.

It was win win for multiple reasons, I hated throwing the cartridges away to a land fill, it was saving me some money and I could only refill the ink that had dried up (instead of buying set of 4 or 5).  As the saying goes first time lucky, first time I did it, it worked like a charm, printer recognized the ink levels and print quality was almost perfect and needless to say I was pretty impressed. 

A few months later  I realized the ink had dried up and I decided to go the same route, this time around the story went slightly differently. After refill the printer refused to show the ink levels and also refused to print anything at all. I tried the color and monochrome but no luck either ways.

I eventually made a trip back to Costco and there I learned a couple of things, first, they can actually measure the cartridge to determine if it has been filled with enough ink. Second, since the cartridge is now a non-standard it is fairly common for printers to show error for the amount of ink present.

Through the weighing process the good friendly Costco lady told me that the black ink for some reason hasn't gone through and she refilled it again. Of course my nightmare was still not over, for after coming back and repopulating the cartridges the printer still had trouble printing (it was printing blank pages or off color).

Then I came across this website inkjet411.com which suggested that I try electronically clean print head (in my printer, it's called clean cartridges) and voila it did the magic and the printer started working properly. One important suggestion the site had was to print a test print once a week to prevent ink from drying up.

Last but not least is that there is a limited number of times that cartridges can be refilled, I don't know that yet and will know soon.