Archive for the ‘laser cartridges’ Category

It’s a perfectly good question, on this blog I urge you to investigate the few firms who can help you refill your toner cartridge with ease. Every time you do refill the cartridge you’re saving about 60-80% of the cost of a new cartridge, and there is virtually no environmental impact. But how many times can you keep refilling a laser toner cartridge.

But I’m afraid it’s actually quite a difficult question, it’s a bit like asking how long your car will last or how many years before my TV needs replacing. There is no specific correct answer as it tends to vary from cartridge to cartridge but for the vast majority of cartridges two or three is easily achievable. Many people keep refilling them until the printouts start being affected.

There are a couple of main reasons why you can’t keep refilling the toner cartridges indefinitely –

OPC Drum – inside your Toner cartridge, where the image is created before being copied onto the page. This will eventually wear our, however it will often keep going for many refills – it depends on the make. There are some printers where this drum can be replaced separately though, so that no longer becomes an issue.

Toner Waste – Toner cartridges all collect their own waste, the unused ink from a printout usually gets collected in a waste section of the cartridge. Eventually this will overflow and cause marks to appear on the printed page. You can empty this manually to extend the life, in much the same way as you make a little hole to refill. In most cartridges you can make a hole in the waste compartment to empty it. Personally I never bother with this step as normally I can get two or three refills without emptying this section.

Emptying the waste compartment can make your toner go on into double figures for some printers though which would save literally hundreds of dollars. Use any reliable refill firm and ask them their advice, they’ll know the average number of refills for your particular cartridge. Just remember even refilling once is going to save you a lot of money and more than half your printing costs.

So How Many Times Can I Refill a Toner Cartridge Then !

Of course it depends on what your printing and what for. I generally refill twice then the third time only put a little ink in and watch the quality. If the print out perhaps starts getting smudges or a reduction in quality then I’ll replace the cartridge with a new one and start again.

The printer companies will always discourage this practice, they’ll hint at damage to the printer which is simply not true (unless you do something incredibly stupid – like refill with something other than ink!). But remember the cost of a new set of cartridges often costs more than a new printer – incredible but true. My last Lexmark laser printer cost me $200 and the refills cost well over $300. Even if I had destroyed the printer every time I used a refill it would have made sense to do this.

The simple facts are that it saves money and helps the environment – check it out!!!

If you’ve a laser printer, you’re a target, a target for profits that is.   So who is targeting you well it’s the printer companies and it all started when you saw that great deal for a shiny new laser printer, what a bargain huh !  And all will be well as you put in the half empty ‘starter cartridge’ and start printing.

Your Great Deal Laser Printer

That’s the first clue you have, you’ll see lots of material and initiative about how eco-friendly all these companies are.  Yet they use all the resources required to produce a normal cartridge, and then only partly fill it. A complete waste of resources, the effort and expense in real terms to just fill it with toner ink for your laser printer is minimal but of course it delays you going on to the next stage.

That’s when you get the shock, the starter cartridge will normally be less than 50% full so pretty soon you’ll be off to price up new laser toner cartridges. In many case this will often be much more than the printer cost in the first place.  In fact it is not uncommon for a full set of laser toner cartridges to cost much, much more than a new printer. But of course they’ve got you now, what good is a big shiny, laser printer without ink?

What purpose does it serve, well it’s pretty much useless as we are aware.

You have no choice to hand over sometimes hundreds of dollars to get your ‘laser printer’ capable of printing again.  This tactic is often seen with good like razors, you buy a very cheap fancy razor for a few pence then find that the blades cost many times more. This is how HP, Samsungs and Lexmarks make money from you, the consumables, this is where the real profit starts to flow.

Have you ever looked at a  toner cartridge and wondered why you have to start again when all it needs is ink?   Does it look like it’s going to fall apart ?  Of course not and it won’t, the reason why you have to but a new one is because it MAKES MORE MONEY for the printer company. Years ago most cartridges used to have little stoppers on them, that you could unplug and fill up with ink,  they have mostly disappeared now not for any practical reason simply because the printer companies can make more money if you don’t. There is a huge environmental impact in all this, don’t be fooled by eco-friendly recycling schemes, if the printer companies didn’t actively stop you refilling toner cartridges it would instantly reduce the resources used and the landfill problem caused by these cartridges.

So How do you Refill Toner Laser Cartidges

It’s actually usually very easy, all you need to do is get some more ink into the cartridge and it will work.  That’s the general principle – there’s no need to modify, replace or change anything else in the cartridge – just top up the ink. Make sure you buy decent compatible toner from a company you can trust, and  importantly advise you on how to refill it.   Generally it’s fairly simple you just have to make a small hole with an inexpensive soldering iron and attachment (got mine for $5) and pour in the replacement toner ink, then seal up the whole with a stopper or even tape.

Of course the printer companies don’t like you doing this, and some have fitted ‘killer chips’ to stop that cartridge working after so many prints (another staggeringly environmentally wasteful tactic), if you have one of those you will often have to replace this little chip with a new one.  It’s very easy to do in most cases but it does add a few bucks to the cost of refilling  the toner, clever people in Taiwan are producing these chips very cheaply. Well that’s usually it, some printer models have little design problems which mean that they are a bit fiddly to replace but check with your toner refill supplier, they’ll know which ones to avoid.  Most however can be refilled with relative ease and the savings can be dramatic on some laser cartridges, check out the process here in this post which shows you how to refill toner.  Often you can refill many, many times, just keep an eye out on the print quality when it starts to get worse simply buy a new cartridge.

There are a few firms that do this and in my experience they are very professional, after all they will only stay in business if you keep refilling your laser printer.   Most will sell you the little kit extremely cheaply and advise you – I always use these guys TonerTopup but the important thing is to try it, you can’t damage your printer and it is much less wasteful, search on the Internet and you’ll find many more companies who will show you how to refill your laser cartridge simply.

Now I won’t have too much of a go at Brother, they’re not nearly as bad as some of the other printer companies.  But if you’ve never used one of these printers let me tell you about a stupid little device that brother have fitted on all the toner cartridges for the Brother HL4070CDW and a few other printers.

Many of the brother printers or rather cartridges count the number of pages that they are supposed to print and then stop working.  So how ridiculous is that, in many cases you’ll see that the cartridge still has toner still left inside it, in some instances this can quite a considerable amount.

Brother HL4070CDW Toner

So how stupid is that ?

It’s a device that tells you when you have run out of toner, even if you haven’t and then stops your printer working.  Lets look at this from an environmental side, this little device has been designed and produced for the sole purpose of telling you to replace your cartridge.

Of course there is another way of seeing when your printer is running out of toner, by looking at the page.  It doesn’t really take Sherlock Holmes to figure out when you need more ink.

Now you can reset  these cartridges, on the side you should find a little flag gear which you can rotate and reset this stupid invention.  At the time of writing this wasn’t on the starter cartridge you get with the machine, presumably so that you’ll get fleeced on your very first print run.

How much toner does this waste?   How many cartridges will get thrown away because of this device stopping them using a toner cartridge for no reason?

Or perhaps we should ask – how many more TN-115BK cartridges will Brother sell, how much more profit will they make to justify this completely unnecessary device?  It’s like your fuel warning light coming on in your car and the car becoming unusable instantly!

This is how most of these companies make money, by getting you to buy as many of their consumables as possible, forget about the cost of the printer this is how they make their money.  Environmentally it is becoming increasingly unacceptable to do this !

By the way when  you have learnt the little trick to reset the page count device, these toner cartridges are actually very easy to refill – you can find all you need here – TonerTopup

Before I go into a simple economic reason for using toner refill kits, lets first examine the environmental argument.    To make a new toner cartridge, you have to use up natural resources, it’s a simple arbitrage, we swap these raw materials to give us a shiny new toner cartridge.   To make a toner cartridge for your average laser printer it requires between 1 and 2 liters of oil.  So every single time you refill your cartridge you’ll save that amount of oil being used, add to that the extra costs in aluminium and steel that are needed and you can see it can make an impact.

Approximately (and obviously this changes) 44 million laser cartridges are sold in Europe every year, and about 78% of these are used once and thrown away.   If every one refilled each cartridge only once you can see the huge saving in resources that would happen relatively easily – shouldn’t we really be doing the simple things like this ??

When I read reasons (usually from people with a vested interest) for not refilling your toner cartridges you get many reasons but the one that usually annoys me most is the damage you could cause to your printer.   A laser toner cartridge is a self contained unit that simply slots into your printer.  When you refill a toner cartridge you don’t touch any working or moving parts you simply make a hole and pour in new toner ink.

Agreed if you pour in hopeless toner then your printing will be rubbish, but would that damage your printer?   Unless you poured in something extremely bizarre I think not.  Buy decent compatible toner from a reputable supplier (and most are as they need you as long term customers) and you’ll be fine.   It’s not rocket science, it’s ink and top quality toner ink will do your printer no harm at all.

But lets take the worse case scenario, my last printer was an expensive Lexmark laser printer which cost me about $240.  The toner cartridge refills where about $400 a set, to refill the cartridges manually  cost about $100.  The economics simply don’t add up the cost of the ink is almost double the cost of the printer anyway, in fact if I blew up every other printer when refilling and bought a new one I’d still be better off.

I’m making that scenario up as of course it’s ludicrous that you could damage your printer unless you poured something pretty strange into your toner cartridge.  Think about it seriously, it’s scandalous how the printer manufacturers are forcing you to buy new or send them back toner cartridges, they could easily be refilled and the environmental impact would be enormous if the printer companies did this themselves.

It can’t go on forever you know, although it’s simple to refill the vast majority of toner cartridges eventually you’ll have to buy a new one.   Although your cartridge initially will just run out of ink, eventually other components in the cartridge will begin to fail.

For those of us who have got used to refilling our own cartridges, the final arbiter of when a toner cartridge is no longer refillable is really down to each of us.  You might think it’s a bit of a nuisance having to monitor the quality of each print out but lets face it we all do that anyway without a second thought.

So what’s likely to be the signs that it’s time to stop refilling your cartridge and face  that bill for a new set?  Well if you’ve already refilled the toner a few times, it’s probably best to keep a closer eye out – the number of times you can refill will vary hugely from cartridge to cartridge and indeed between different manufacturers.  I can’t give a figure but my record is 4 refills before needing to get a new cartridge for an older HP Laserjet model, I know many people feel happy with refilling once or twice though and then buy a new cartridge automatically.

Even if you have only refilled a cartridge once with compatible toner then you’ve helpded the environment considerable and your pocket too.

But anyway the great thing is that when the toner cartridge is starting to fail completely the very first signs will be on the printed page.  Spots, dots or dark areas on the printout are a common sign, also void or completely blank areas.  These will often be repeated in a pattern down the page, another common sign is razor thin line appearing down the page.

When you start to see these signs then I’m afraid it’s time to order a new cartridge either new or remanufactured.  The choice is yours but I have had problems with cartridges that have been remanufactured and will normally buy a new cartridge and then repeat my refilling toner process.  The amount of money you will save is quite staggering, especially if you’ve refilled a few times.

Of course there may be unused toner left in the cartridge when the other components start to fail.  If this is the case you can reclaim the ink and reuse that in your next cartridge, be careful though it’s sometimes trickier to get the toner out of a cartridge.  I have to say I rarely bother to reclaim any toner, if you don’t try and reclaim any ink from the waste compartment of the cartridge as this toner colour will be contaminated.   All in all it’s pretty easy to tell when it’s time to stop refilling your cartridges, just look at the printouts – simple really.