If you’re lucky then some cartridges are so well made that they can keep being refilled easily.  I know a local business that has been using a tried and tested Epson Aculaser C1100 for years now.   Which is pretty impressive for a business as it’s not a terribly expensive printer.

Of course they had that initial shock, we all do, when the first cartridges ran out of ink and they found out the cost of Epson replacement cartridges.  But luckliy for them and their local landfill site they managed to find a company who provided a replacement compatible toner cartridge kits for a fraction of the price.

Cartridges for the Aculaser C1100 are easily refilled

Well they managed to refill the cartridges without any dramas and kept printing until the toner ran out again.  The owner decided to keep refilling until she noticed the print quality deteriorating, and then to purchase a new cartridge.

Well the owner kept refilling these cartridges and when they got to 5 they decided to buy a new toner cartridge for their trust Epson.

The cost savings had already been huge and although the quality was as good as the original, you sometimes feel you shouldn’t push it too far.

Although I have to say there us little reason to not keep refilling the printer cartridge as much as you can.  So if you’re lucky enough to have an Epson C1100 toner cartridge, then do your wallet and the environment a favour and try refilling the cartridges!

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.

Now I know despite being hugely ripped of for replacement cartridges, many people feel a little unsure about refilling their toner, so I thought I’d post a little refill toner review. Now the method will vary slightly depending on the printer cartridge your going to refill but essentially the vast majority now focus on one distinct method.

This method is the ‘make a hole’ and ‘pour’ method. Now if you are really lucky on the side of your cartridge their may be a little stopper that can be opened. If you have you’re in luck as all you have to do is open the stopper and pour in some replacement toner ink. Difficult huh ! Most cartridges used to have these little refill plugs but the printer companies now have helpfully replaced them as they realised they can make loads more money by selling you new ones or refurbishing your existing cartridges (the annoying thing is they pretend to be eco-friendly by doing this!).

If the printer companies put back these little stoppers it would have a huge environmental benefit, people could refill toner in their cartridges with no effort at all. Unfortunately I don’t think this is likely unless they are forced by legislation. The reality is most of us will be faced with the problem of the cartridge being sealed so will have to find a way of opening the cartridge.

Refill Toner Review – Some Steps

So let’s first start by looking at the tools needed, you can either put these together yourself or the companies who supply refill toners will sell you one. The picture here contains the standard items in kit, which is all you’ll need on most cartridges, they’re not expensive I think I paid about $14 for my first toner refill kit.

Typical Toner Refilling Kit

Review Toner refill Kit

You can see from the kit, there’s some gloves, stoppers, pincers, plugs and a soldering iron. The most important item is probably the soldering iron with a little adapter. To use this you simply let it heat up and touch the side of the toner cartridge. A little hole will be created and you use this to pour the replacement toner into the cartridge.

You can then use the stopper to reseal the hole and make a nice neat job, and that’s basically it. No really for many printer cartridges that is all you need to do. It takes a few minutes and provided you don’t pour the toner all over your shoes instead of the cartridge and use quality compatible toner your toner cartridge will be as good as new.
I’d like to say it takes great skill but actually it doesn’t – it can’t do I have done it on many occasions.

I’d like to say a little word in my mini toner refill review about the replacement ink. This is probably the most important part of refilling the cartridge, if you fill it with rubbish then you will get poor results. Fortunately most of the companies I’ve used all provide top quality ink which is exactly the same as the toner you will get in the original cartridges.

Compatible Ink

Toner Refill Bottle

When you shake the toner bottle, the ink is so fine that it behaves like liquid. This makes it very easy to pour into the hole you have created, obviously be sensible and don’t do this over your beige lounge carpet though! Most of the bottles are supplied with a pouring nozzle like this one in the image, it really is a very simple job to refill toner.

Once you’ve poured the toner in, then you just have to use one of the stoppers in the kit to seal the unit. It’s nothing fancy as long as the toner doesn’t leak through the hole you should be fine. Don’t worry if you don’t have any stoppers, you can use strong packing tape just as well, it doesn’t look as neat but works fine.

Here’s one that has been completed and ready to go back into your printer. So I urge you to give it a go, you will be making a big difference to your pocket and also it’s saving new cartridges being produced (takes about 2 litres of oil to produce each one) plus the old one going to landfill.

Example Toner stopper

You can often refill your cartridges many times and you’ll save a small fortune on replacement toner. The cartridges are all self contained so there’s no risk to your printer and if you buy quality ink you’ll not notice any reduction in quality of your printing either.

Many schools and businesses refill their cartridges routinely and literally save thousands every year, the savings do add up. I hope my brief toner refill review has given you the impetus to give it a go, it really is simple and the savings can be considerable! Here’s the company I use if you want a recommendation – Toner Topup

I used to think my Lexmark C530 was a fantastic printer, the colours were superb, the printing fast and quiet, but my opinion has now changed because of the cost of the Lexmark C530 toner.

Many people buy a laser printer because they think it is the economical choice when you are doing a lot of printing, however my experience of this printer was entirely the opposite.   the costs to keep this printer running were simply ridiculous, particularly if you used Lexmark C530 Cartridges.

If you’ve found yourself in the unfortunate position of checking out prices for replacement cartridges for the Lexmark C530 then let me give you some advice.  Manufacturers like Lexmark deliberately discount the cost of their printers for one reason, they make much more money on charging you a fortune each time it runs out of ink.

When the Lexmark C530 runs out of toner you are expected to return it in some Pseudo Green Recycling scheme, when in reality the green option is just refilling it with replacement toner.  Not they’d ever admit this of course, even the bags you return your old cartridge are covered in pictures of trees to reinforce their point.

Well do yourself and the environment a favour, save some serious money and just refill the toner inside your old C530 cartridge.

Refill Lexmark C530 Toner

So it is hard to replace the toner in a Lexmark C530 cartridge, well to be honest it is actually very easy. First time you do it, it might take 15 minutes to be careful but it really is a very quick job.

So what’s actually involved?

Well I bought a kit from Toner Topup to refill my cartridge. I checked on their printer selector tool and I got a kit specifically for refilling the Lexmark C530 including compatible toner. The kit included a little soldering iron with a special end which creates a hole in the cartridge, a little plug to seal the whole and a set of colour toners.

All you do is make a little hole in the cartridge with the soldering iron tool, shake the replacement toner and refill the cartridge. A spare stopper then seals the toner cartridge and you’ve finished.

I’d never used a soldering iron in my life and it was extremely easy just touch it to the side of the cartridge and push gently – ermm that’s it. there’s really nothing too it, the toner ink refill is like liquid and easy to pour, although I reckon it would make a mess if you spilt it. It took me a little over 30 minutes to replace the toner in all the cartridges, that was being very careful.

The amount of money I saved by refilling my Lexmark C530 Toner, rather than buy new cartridges was over $300 (yes you read right), mind you the huge saving was mainly due to the huge price of the replacements. It might have fallen now as the printer is a couple of years old and the prices have fallen slightly I believe.  

the environmental benefit is not insignificant either, I refilled one toner cartridge four times, before getting a new one, and that’s saved lots of new cartridges being produced and old ones ending up in landfill or being remanufactured. If you need to replace your Lexmark C530 Toner – try and refill it makes sense in every way.

By the way you’ll often hear horrible reasons why you shouldn’t do this. they’ll always be from someone with an interest in you buying a new toner cartridge instead of refilling.

Here’s a few -

• You’ll damage your printer – the cartridge is a self contained unit, how could it damage the printer. Mind you in my case – I could have bought a new Lexmark C530 with the savings from replacing one set of cartridges !
• You’ll void your warranty – rumours of voiding manufacturers warranty by not using their cartridges are false. This is illegal in USA and UK and most of Europe
• The Print Quality will be worse – it is true that eventually the quality of the printout will begin to worsen as other parts of the cartridge fail. But often you can refill the cartridge many times before this happens, and then you just get a new one!

It’s not just the Lexmark C530 toner that can be refilled, almost all modern printers can with a little effort in exchange for huge savings both monetary and environmentally ! try it , you won’t regret it.