iP8750: Does opening cover consume ink?

[ninj]

Quick question, if I may. I like to visually check the ink levels in my refillable carts on a regular basis so that I can refill them when the non-sponge side runs low (the good people on this forum, as well as my own experience, have taught me not to trust the ARC chips). If I open the cover of my iP8750 to access the cartridges (without removing them), will that then trigger a purge cycle after closing it? What about if a cartridge is removed and then put back? I'm not too bothered about wasted ink, but I don't want to fill the absorber pads prematurely as -- if I understand correctly -- there's no way to reset the counter on this printer. I'm just trying to work out how often it would be reasonable to check ink levels.

Thanks in advance.

 

[CakeHole]

Yes it will consume a small amount of ink, (at least all Canons i have came across do in that situation do). Similar to what happens on an initial power on of the printer.

I would not worry about the waste ink tank/pad filling up too prematurely though, unless you are checking the carts levels manually everytime you use the printer.

Id personally trust within reason what the ARC chips are telling you and when the levels are around a quarter is when i would remove and refill the carts. Checking them when the ink level still says its full or half full, providing you did actually fill a cart when you removed it, and the ink level has not been reading 100% for an unusually long time is a bit too paranoid.

 

[ninj]

Thanks for your informative reply.

Incidentally, I think you might be referring to older-style ARC chips that reset when removed for refilling. The problem with my ARC chips (which I believe are now the most common types) is that they reset only when the cartridge (including sponge) is nearly empty - a situation best avoided otherwise cartridges would require frequent flushing. I want to refill before the ink chamber empties (to keep the sponge saturated) which means the ink counters won't indicate the true ink levels. So a visual inspection is required. Based on your advice, and my usage, I guess about once a week should be enough.

By the way, I have just realised that my print driver/rip (Turboprint running on Fedora 24) has software resettable ink counters (but doesn't reset the hardware counters unfortunately!) It doesn't provide a direct indication of cartridge levels, because it counts up in drops rather than down by volume and has no knowledge of cleaning cycles etc. But with, some experimentation, it might be good enough for my purposes. Yet another advantage of not using Windows.

 

[CakeHole]

If all the ARC carts on 550/551 carts now work like that they should be fine to leave alone until they register empty. Refilling those types before hand could lead to a situation where the ink level monitoring says a cart is empty when it is not. As per http://www.octoink.co.uk/kb/questions/199/Troubleshooting:+PGI-550,+CLI-551+Auto+Reset+Chips

If you still want to keep a check on it then i would still only visually checking when it says a cart is a quarter full, i would not check it every week, or be that paranoid unless you are printing enough to go through a cart in a week. Only now instead of refilling at the quarter full mark visually check the cart is about quarter full (ie ROUGHLY matches what the ink monitoring levels are saying) and continue as normal until it reads empty before refilling. You can at the quarter mark refill if you wish but as described in the octoink link above that may lead to the ink level monitors saying a cart is out of ink when in fact it is not.

CLI-551, CLI-8 and canon carts of similar design have a prism in the ink chamber so once that runs out you should get your first warning about ink being low regardless. AT that point is when i would keep an eye on things, if after a few more heavy coverage prints the empty message does not appear id refill and just live with the ink monitoring being wrong until it figures things out.

 

[ninj]

That's a useful link I hadn't seen before. I had heard that it's good to keep the sponge side full, but based on the above I guess it's not so important.

Thanks again for all your advice.