Ink waste collection

[The Hat]

@Ink stained Fingers you continued to mention you reuse your waste ink 3 times already, despite other members strongly advising against this very poor practice, but you still say it’s a great ink saver.

Anyone who cares for their printer would not want to try this fool hardy idea out, and to save what exactly, aren’t 3rd party inks 80% cheaper than OEM ink so what’s the point, is that not enough of a saving. ?

There are more than enough print head problems reported on here on a daily basics without introducing more unwanted and unnecessary issues that may well cause the early demise of their valuable printers, it certainly goes against the teachings here on good refilling practices and procedures..

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

Oh, actually I'm not advocating the reuse of waste ink, I'm just reporting my longtime experience with it and that it is not causing a problem for me. Just to illustrate this with one example - I'm running a Epson L300 since 11 months, now with 42 000 pages, and 95% of those with black waste ink. If you assume an ink consumption for some text print of 50 microliters/page, that makes more than 2 liters of black ink , so I'm getting to the bottom of some bottles. Actually I was printing several thousand full page images as well, but bad enough that printer model is deprived of borderless printing. I'm not doing it for savings, I do it because it works and does not cause me any of all the other printhead and refill problems, of which I have experienced a lot as well, and paid for it. It's like in sports and otherwise, some people do something and don't have a problem with it but it may not be recommendable to others. But o.k., I'm closing this subject, the starting question has been answered, and no adverse experience has been reported yet.

 

[ThrillaMozilla]

...pigment ink ...works without problem in the black pigment ink cartridge as a mix from the black pigment ink and the photo dye inks....

Pigment can flocculate if the composition of the fluid is not quite right, and if that happens, your print head is toast. When you mix anything with pigment ink, you are in terra incognita. I'm happy for you that you have had success with it, but I still wouldn't advise it. I especially wouldn't advise it for someone who prints occasionally, since even a tiny bit of flocculation will cause the ink to clump up.

 

[ttgfish]

I guess I will avoid reusing. Sounds like more trouble than benefit.
So what is the best way to recycle the ink then?

 

[ThrillaMozilla]

Drink it?

 

[stratman]

So what is the best way to recycle the ink then?

Painting? Fountain pen? Your city's recycle facility?

 

[The Hat]

Drink it?

Guinness is much nicer and won’t clog up your insides and far less harmful.
Plus it will be green tomorrow..

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

Guinness - green - ooh.k. - I rather would prefer some dark Porter in place of other black inks .......

 

[Smile]

No they don't get mixed. The printer deposits the colors as separate dots. And even if the dots happen to coincide on the paper, they were separate in the print head.

Try reusing ink with a 5-color printer and then tell us what you think. If anyone ever mixes pigment and dye ink, that is really asking for trouble. You could be lucky, or maybe not.

Printers overprint one dot onto antoher to make new colors, DYE printers that is. Pigment printers can't do this since pigments don't mix, they are not translucent. So Pigment printers have many cartridges to compensate for "lost color gamut" compared to DYE printers.

An average user thinks that printer with say Orange, Red, Green inks prints better than CMYK, or CMYKcm printer but in practice gamut can be the same or bigger for DYE printer.

Additional cartridges containing additional colors is beneficial to OEM manufacturers that sell more ink. Instead they should improve DYE ink papers etc. Instead now most everyone believes printers must have MK and PK carts when single black cart is all you need. For serious BW work multiple gray carts however are beneficial. But thats easy to dilute black ink into gray shades DIY way.

@pharmacist had a recipe here on the forum too.

 

[turbguy]

Canon heats just a minute amount of ink to create the bubbles expelling the ink, but that vapor would not collect in the waste ink bin anyway. And there is no heating at all during the cleaning process when the ink is flushed through the nozzles into the waste ink res. But it is correct that black Canon pigment ink would not work in the dye photo black channel, but works without problem in the black pigment ink cartridge as a mix from the black pigment ink and the photo dye inks, on plain paper where I wouldn't need the best print quality for the daily news anyway. It's a no-issue to reuse waste ink, but it worked, for years, as described on Canon, at the time I was using Canon, and works as well on Epson printers, even with a mix of pigment inks and dye inks in R265's, L300 and various other XP models, and on Brother with a mix of leftover sublim inks, some original black pigment ink and other leftover from R265's.

It is thought that Canon Print Heads fire during cleaning...FYI.