thank you didn't know that, nice to know that the whirring sound isn't necessarily ink filling up the pads. Is there anyway to distinguish between the two operations? Seems to be another good incentive to have a potty fitted when the warranty lapses.
to make it clear - stray ink accumulates during the printing process - you may have stray ink droplets not landing on the paper but taking a shortcut to the nozzle plate where they slowly build an ink film of mixed inks. A wiper in the cleaning unit is wiping off that ink , and the pump moves it to the waste pads - so yes - it is filling up the waste pads - but additional ink is not used as it is used for the nozzle cleaning process . You can carefully watch the activities arund the cleaning unit - the wiper is raised up in most printers - the printhead moves over it and back into the resting position, and you hear the pump, but the head is not moved yet onto the pads in the cleaning unit. All these detail movements vary significantly from printer model to printer model. They are described in detail - incl. timing - in most of the service manuals for the particular printer.
Rather get a printer with a user replaceable waste ink bin; let me just give you an example - I'm currently using an L805 - A4 with 6 inks - 42 000 pges are printed - internet stuff - text - images etc and the waste ink counter displays just 75 %, that's so low that I never would install an external waste bin.
Have a look at the Canon Maxify models, they are still the best around.
Thank you for pointing me in this direction, while the publicly available service manual does not go into that level of detail it does explain how to interpret the EEPROM printout to determine how many cleaning and what type of cleaning cycles were performed- thankfully it rules out excessive purges every print job(9 cleaning cycles in total over 1500 pages).
I agree, unfortunately the canon one's were too expensive and the Epson we were looking at wasn't in stock when we bought one.
