Posts Tagged ‘empty Toner cartridges’

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!!!

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 kit to refill toner.

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

THe environmental battle is real, urgent and you can help. If you own a laser printer and end up throwing those empty toner cartridges away. There’s lots of ways you can do this by starting to recycle them.

Remember the mantra for our day has to “reduce, reuse and recycle”

the simple fact is that yoou can save valuable raw materials, energy and waste by simply using your lasetr toner cartridges again. In Europe there are nearly 50 million laser cartidges bought each year, 95% of these only get used once. Considering each new cartridge takes between 1 and 2 litres of oil to produce, that’s a lot of waste.

These cartridges end up in landfill areas, thousands of tons every year across the world. The materials don’t exactly decompose quickly either, the plastics are usually non-biodegradable. Every single time you reuse a cartridge you save on waste landfill.

Don’t throw these empty toner cartridges away or even send off to the many ‘so-called’ environmentally friendly remanufacture schemes, designed to save the print companies eco-reputation. Remember these empty toner cartridges all used to come with a little stopper which you could use to refill with compatible toner ink, now that’s eco friendly.
However the printng companies realised they were missing out on a huge source of revenue here – so they removed them.

You can Refill those Empty Toner Cartridges!

There are many companies who can provide you with simple kits which can refill most empty toner cartridges. Many of these cartidges can be refilled 4 or 5 times with no real problems and each time you are saving up to 87% of the cost of a new laser toner cartridge.

All you need is one of the kits and some compatible toner to refill it, most cases it’s a 5 minute job, and requires no real skill. Empty toner cartridges still work they just have run out of ink so just refill them.

It’s true these cartridges are not broken, they’re not faulty, they are merely empty. If you notice a little plug or stopper on your cartridge, it means that your toner is one of the lucky few and is designed to be refilled. Just buy some replacement toner and refill the empty cartridge.

Other cartridges need you to create a refiller hole but it’s very simple with the right kit anyone can do this. You don’t need to tamper with the cartidge itself (as you have to in remanufacturing), so there’s little that can go wrong. You’re just filling it up with ink.

They won’t damage your printer, and you can refill the cartridge until you see a deterioration in the print quality and then simply buy a new one. The advantage you will have saved hundreds of dollars and reduced environmental waste significantly. Imagine if everyone did this, saving millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands less toner cartridges being produced and thrown away.

So explore our site and check out some links, please don’t throw away those empty toner cartridges, refill them and save some money.