We’ve all wondered about whether we should risk refilling our cartidges with compatible toner.  Especially us laser printer owners faced with throwing or sending away that huge plastic manufactured cartridge just because it’s ran out of ink.

Last year I was faced with a bill of several hundreds of dollars to replace the laser toner cartridges in my Lexmark laser printer.  The bill was actually more than the cost of the printer and I was not very impressed.

The manufacturers of printers both inkjet and laser printers make massive profits based on what I like to call razor blade economics.  The ploy is you manufacture a device (such as a razor or printer) and then make sure that using the product is hugely expensive.  If you don’t buy the consumables (the toner or blades) then the product is useless to you.

You can refill Toner Cartridges

Less than a decade ago, most devices which used toner were refilled from a plastic bottle of ink.

You’d simply open a stopper and refill with toner ink, it was quick and simple to do.  Nowadays these companies actually develop technology to stop you refilling the cartridges.

TONER FACT 1

The average toner cartridge takes between 1 and 2 litres of oil to manufacture.   Every time you re-use that toner cartridge that’s one less that needs to be produced.

TONER FACT 2

The average toner cartridge does not need replacing when it has run out of ink.  The only reason is that the manufacturers make much more money by forcing you to buy a new laser cartridge or by making you send it back to them for ‘remanufacture’.

Should I use Compatible Toner to refill ?

If your laser printer has just run out ink, and you are looking for a replacement, stop for a minute and look at that cartridge.

• Does it look like it has been manufactured to last one print run?
• Is it falling to bits ?
• Does it look damaged or worn out?

I can tell you now, if all it’s done is sit in your printer, it’s fine there is only one problem it has run out of ink.  That’s all, nothing else, 10 years ago we would have opened a little stopped poured in some toner ink and carried on printing.

Alas the firms making these printers have taken away the stoppers allowing us to refill them,  of course they make much more money by selling us new ones. But you can still refill the vast majority of toner cartridges with compatible toner.

So if you want to Save Money, if you want to help the environment and if you want to reduce profits for the big printer companies then refill your toner cartridges with compatible toner.    There are more and more companies appearing now that do this,  please feel free to recommend any that you’ve used.

This company is one I have used on several occasions – Toner Topup , extremely knowledgeable and they have hundreds of custom kits for specific printers.

If you’ve ever investigated the possibility of refilling your toner cartridges, you’ll probably have come across information warning against compatible toner quality.   In some cases they’re absolutely correct, occasionally you’ll find a company that just sells low grade toner refills just to make a quick buck.    But I can assure you that they are more the exception than the rule, after all it doesn’t make much sense as a business model.   The firms who sell printer toner refills, have in a way the same vested interest as the printer manufacturers.

Compatible Toner Quality Problems
Imagine you’ve set up your business to supply people and companies with compatible toner for them to refill their cartridges over and over. Customer will save so much money each time they do it that they’re bound to keep coming back for more. The costs will have to be significantly lower than the brand refills obviously but if the toner is of the same quality, there are no real issues.

Why try and make a few pennies by sending out inferior toner, you’ll get angry customers, no repeat business and lots of stress. The vast majority of companies in this line are very green minded and want to provide a good eco friendly service.

Take the Risk

Seriously have a look around, try and find some recommendations, ask a few questions of the supplier. The cost and environmental savings are so large it’s worth taking a risk. Even if you are really unlucky and get poor quality toner refills it won’t have cost very much. You can even put the cartridge away for when you need to do a big print run when quality is not that important.

Seriously in most situations where I have used toner refills in many, many printers the results have been indistinguishable from the brand toner refills. The average savings of about 80% make it a real boon in these days of rising prices.

I generally only use the one firm when I am buying compatible toner refills, of course if you’re in teh US it’s probably not worth using them – but use their checker tool to see if your printer can be refillled easily – you can find it here

You can then try and find a company nearer home, if anyone has any real experience of such companies outside the UK then I’d be really interested to hear about them.

It might not seem important, but if you look carefully at the Epson SX215 printer you’ll see the problems facing the printer companies. It’s not obvious at first, just seems a bargain all in one printer, gets loads of decent reviews and a fraction of the cost you’d have paid for something like this a few years ago.

Epson Stylus SX215

The reason that Epson are selling these printers at such a low price is because their business model depends on it.     In the UK its currently about £50, which is very cheap in my opinion but no great surprise.

You see Epson and all the major printer manufacturers don’t make the majority of their profits on selling printers like the Epson Stylus SX215 at that low price.   They actually make very little, in some cases I suspect virtually nothing on the hardware cost themselves.

The model requires that they make money on consumables, which when you think about it makes a lot more sense from a profit point of view.    The paper and printer costs of the average ink jet printers is much more than the costs if the printer itself.

Why is the Epson SX215 so interesting?

I’ll tell you why, simply because it perfectly illustrates the dilemma facing the printing companies.  They are locked into this business model which is crumbling around them.  You see forcing you to buy something like consumables is fraught with dangers – here’s just a few of them.

• It’s not Environmentally Friendly – this is probably of least concern to the companies, who can always spin their approach into a green looking one.  The most environmentally friendly way to keep a printer running is to produce high quality toner and ink cartridges which can be easily and cheaply refilled by the user – unfortunately although entirely possible this massively cuts back potential profits.
• How to force consumers to buy your refills (legislation) – from a legal point of view this is actually quite difficult.  Many countries have legislation which stops you doing things like saying the a guarantee is invalid  if you don’t use their refills
• Technical Enforcement – like many printers the cartridges on the Epson Stylus SX215 have little chips on them to force you to use only Epson Inks, however these are actually very easy to copy and are being copied in cheap replaceable ink cartridges

Juts  looking at these three issue you can see companies like Epson have a problem from many sides with this business model, from environmental, legal and the technical sides they are under attack.  Let’s just look at the comparative costs to better illustrate -

I’m using the amazon costs for this printer just to illustrate properly

• Printer Cost at Amazon UK  - Listed at £49.99 here
• Epson replacement Cartridge Cost – 26.74 for four here – so that’s about £6.68 each.
• But freely available and actually pushed by Amazon are these inks 10.99 for 12 here – which is about £0.91 each.

That makes the cost of the Epson cartridges 700% more expensive than buying compatible inks with a built in chip, that’s one heck of a price difference !

There will of course the usual nonsensical arguments about printer damage and print quality of course. But let’s take print quality first – lets assume the Epson ink produces slightly better prints (which is by no means guaranteed) on the Epson SX215. But most people are not that bothered about fantastic print quality for every print out, in fact it could be argued that the average buyer of a cheap multipurpose printer like this just wants a simple printer that makes decent copies – are they prepared to pay 700% more for a possible slight quality boost?

The printer companies will have to make a decision soon, the problems of sustaining this environmentally unfriendly business model are mounting. The free market is hitting this rip off model used to overcharge buyers of their printers.

I hope they see sense and start making these printers refillable – stop wasting time and resources in producing killer chips in printers and cartridges just to make more money. If they did this and supplied quality refills at a reasonable price they might actually do rather well from it, people might stop refilling with compatible toner and use theirs instead.

If you’re interested in ‘going green’, solar panels might be exactly the way to do it.

People oftentimes don’t get into solar panels because they think they won’t be able to make it work in the end. Lets say you are going to just charge up a 12 volt battery with a 12 volt solar panel. How would you go about doing that?

You can buy a 12 volt panel on Amazon.com, real cheap. A 5Watt 12 Volt Solar panel goes for about $60. Wattage equation is P = EI, where P is Watts, E is Volts and I is current. Therefore, to determine how much current in amps that 5 watt panel will give you, I = P/E or 5/12 = 416 milliamps. In reality, it will probably provide around 300 milliamps of current. It’s best to get a panel that supplies an amp of current to charge a 12 volt battery fast enough. That would mean you purchase a 12 or 15 Watt panel. A 10 Watt panel would give you 830 milliamps, or .83 amps to charge your battery, which isn’t bad. You could go green for as little as $35.

Make sure, if you’re going to mount it outdoors, that it’s sealed in silicon and ready to be mounted outdoors. If you’re just going to set it out yourself in the yard, then it doen’t need to be properly sealed for ourdoors use. Also, you can build your own glass enclosure, using silicon to seal it like an aquarium.

The kind of 12 volt battery that you’d need to purchase is the kind you get at a Marine Equipment store. They always have what are called ‘Deep Cycling batteries which can be charged up to 100 times without losing their ability to take a charge. You can also buy batteries like that at any Pep Boys, Sears, or Target store. The absolute best ones to use, though, are Marine Batteries that are called ‘Glass Mat’ batteries. They cost around $150 for a large 12 volt battery, but they’re worth it in the end. So, if you are going to go green and you want to store that 12 volt energy, you’ll need a deep cycle or glass mat battery.

Second thing you’ll need, if the panel doesn’t already have one built-in, is a Schottky Blocking Diode, which range around $3. Just look up Solar Panel Schottky Blocking Diode in Google and you’ll find them. Try not to get one which has a current capacity that’s way bigger than you actually need. Double your needs. If your solar panel is rated at 12 volts at 500 millamps, 500 milliamps is half an amp. Multiply that by four and get a 2 amp Schottky diode. The more current that flows through the diode, the more the diode will heat up. You can screw the diode through it’s hole to a piece of metal to radiate heat if it’s heating up too much. If you want to not have to pay an arm-and-a-leg by purchasing a full-blown Charge Controller, a schottky diode will let you go green for only $3.00. However, you generally have to ensure that the battery voltage that’s coming from the solar panel is less than 14 volts.

So, instead of worrying about which schottky diode you’ll need, If you purchase a Sunguard 4.5 Amp Solar Charge Controller for $30, it has the blocking diode built-in that will allow a battery to be charged up without the battery discharging through the solar panel at night. Also, it will ensure that the 12 volt output from the solar panel doesn’t go above the 14 volts the battery needs to charge. The Solar Charge Controller has an instruction booklet that comes with it, so you can’t go wrong.

If you are into saving money, solar panels might be what you’d like to try.

There are many ways you can be introduced into using solar energy. You can pay anything from $1.00 all the way up to thousands of dollars to better the world with the use of solar energy.

You can save money with solar energy many ways. People get confused about solar energy. They think that solar energy just means the use of electronic ‘solar panels’, and that’s one good way to save with solar energy; but solar energy means more than just that.

Solar Power

Solar just means sun; so solar energy means that you are getting some, or all, of your energy from the sun. If you have a pool, you’re already utilizing solar energy in the summer. During the day, the pool absorbs energy from the sun and in the nighttime that energy is stored in your pool. If the temperature in the day was 90 degrees, then by the time the sun goes down the pool is 90 degrees. Once the sun goes down and the temperature drops to 70 degrees, the pool is still 90. You can swim in the pool until midnight, and the temperature of the pool might drop to 80 degrees, whereas the outside temperature is still 70 degrees. That’s a perfect example of how solar energy works. You could save money by utilizing that solar energy.

If you’ve ever touched a black car in the summertime, you’ll know that black absorbs energy best. The reason it’s black, in the first place, is because it is sucking in every color of light that it can. Red hits it, it gets absorbed by the material. Green hits it, it gets absorbed. So, when light is absorbed and doesn’t reflect back out, that’s why you don’t see any color coming from the black. If green were reflected back, the object would be green. You might save money if you were to utilize solar energy.

Each time something absorbs a color, it heats up. Thus, because black absorbs all frequencies (mostly), it reflects none and grows the hottest. People who understood that concept started realizing that they might be able to capture that energy, radiate it throughout a house or through water, and they’d heat the house or they’d heat the water. So, without any ‘electronic solar panels’ at all, you heat your house. Black paint is the only secret that you need. The sun heats the black panel, the heat from the black panel is transferred to water by crisscrossing tubes back-and-forth across the surface of the black panel, then pumping the water so it circulates. That’s how you save money if you use solar energy.

Therefore, if a pool heats up even with no black covering, if you put a black piece of plastic across the pool in the daytime when you’re not using it, heat would be absorbed into the faster and quicker. That same concept is the one which is used when you purchase a solar powered water heater. If you live in the South, you already know that the water coming from your tap or shower nozzle is hot. If you live in Arizona, and you want to take a nice cool shower, that shower will be 100 degrees. The reason is, the water pipes are close enough to the ground that radiant energy absorbs through the ground into the pipes. You should be using that solar energy too, it could save you money.

In this world of ‘just throw it away’, we are being choked by plastics. If you look on the internet you’ll find that they have found continent-sized plastic islands out there. There are two of them, not just one. If you compare their size with the size of the United States, it is equal in size. It came as a surprise to them. Since they floated just below the surface of the water, and because they were rather spread-out relative to their neighbors in most places, nobody had much noticed these gigantic plastic islands. So, it is important that we start recycling printer cartridges.

One third of all businesses are now recycling printer cartridges, whether they be laser toner cartridges or inkjet cartridges. The amount of garbage that goes to landfills increases every day; and because huge cities such as Los Angeles and New York generate such a gigantic amount of garbage every year… they are deciding to get rid of their garbage in disastrous ways.

Many beaches are now as much as 70 percent plastic. If you separate the sand particles from the plastic particles, that’s what you end up with. These multi-colored plastic balls are slowly replacing the sand. How long will it take before they’re 100% plastic. Plastics increase the number of free radicals in the air. The more free radicals that we breath means the more our bodies have to try eliminating those free radicals via our Glutathione Peroxidase systems. One of the reasons we’re loading our bodies up with antioxidants such as Vitamin-C, Beta carotene, Vitamin-A and drinking so many drinks with Acai and Mangosteen in them is because we are a free-radical mess. How often do you change out your printer cartridge? Once a week? Every one of those has to go somewhere. Many are going directly into our oceans. Recycling printer cartridges is a way you can reduce the amount of plastics which are going into our oceans and into the air.

Free radicals are the things which age our bodies. They’re the thing which causes us to get cancer. They’re the things which tire us down, make us lethargic and increase the amount of pain that’s in our bodies. Why is everybody coming down with such ailments as fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome? Why have levels of autism shot off the charts? Will they find that all this plastic nightmare that we’ve created is related to plastics? Will all of these companies who rely upon the continuance of a billion tons of plastic a year ever change their minds about creating and dumping all those plastics into our environment? Probably not… so, the answer which makes sense right now is, recycling printer cartridges makes sense.

It’s really not that hard to recycle printer cartridges. Look on the instructions that came with your inkjet or toner cartridge and they’ll outline exactly the procedure you should use when you wish to recycle the printer cartridge. Contact Laser-tone International at 1(800) EARTH-58 and they’ll even pick up the old cartridge and deliver the new one back to you very quickly.

Also, with a little checking online you can find out about which companies in your area purchase printer cartridges. Some companies are creating cross-referenced lists which show your particular cartridge and how it can be remanufactured into another laser printer cartridge. There are things you can do, such as recycling printer cartridges, to improve the world and reduce the numbers of plastics that are being dumped into it.