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.

Well 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.

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 tehn I’ll replace the cartridge with a new one and start again.

Hewlett Packard are renowned for the quailty of their products, from computers, laptops to the wide range of printers an peripherals they are one of the leading manufactirers in all these areas. They have a popular brand name and arguably a name you can trust especially in the areas of printers and printing technology.

If you into any office in the world there’s a very good chance that you’ll find a Hewlett Packard laser printer. The name HP Laserjet is now synonymous with a good quality office laser printer.

There are some problems with the HP printers that I have found in my experience though. I have worked in the IT industry all my adult life and would heartily recommend most of HPs office based printers, BUT the quality of the software that drives some of their home office, all-in-one based printers can be variable.

Let’s understand that the majority of people just want to print, scan or fax with their printers. Our computers are already overloaded with huge bloated software applications that provide us with functionality we’ll likely never know existed never mind need. HP all-in-one printers are notorious for this – endless navigators, easy to manage printer consoles and software to check, print and fax.

These programs sit in our task bar, monitoring, consuming our PCs memory and frequently locking, or updating themselves across the internet. I don’t know about anyone else but mostly I just want the printer, scanner and fax drivers. Anything else can be loaded when I require by me starting the program, HP navigator frankly you can keep it.

Well after that minor rant, I’ll move onto the one that HP are not alone in. All the printer manufacturers are culpable of this crime, and it is a crime in the context of the environment.

The huge plastic, advanced toner cartridges which we must either dispose of, or send back to recycle after one use is a huge waste of resources. Look at an empty toner carrtidge and I defy you to believe that this cartridge is useless after printing a few hundred pieces of paper.

Why must Laser Toner Cartridges be replaced after on use?

Well the answer to this is simple. The reason we must only use a laser toner cartridge once is because this is the model that produces the maximum profit margin for companies like Hewlett Packard.

Can you honestly believe that the toner cartridge isn’t capable of being used many, many more times if it was simply filled up with ink. Welll they always used to be capable but apparently technology seems to have gone backward now as they now must be recycled or re-manufactured

Shame on you alll printer companies, quit the phony eco-recycling schemes and give us back ordinary refillable toner cartridges to help save the environment. If not we will refill them ourselves anyway !!!

Just remember that every new cartridge that is produced takes between 1 and 2 litres of oil, millions of these are used all over the world. The cost to the environment is massive and it’s something the printer companies could do something about if they put aside the profit motive for a moment.