Question about German Method refilling

[Mowerman90]

Last night I refilled all of the 221 and 220 carts from my MP640 . This is the 5th time for these OEM carts and everything went as normal except for the Cyan cart. The ink chamber was almost empty and I inserted my needle slowly and started filling slowly until I noticed that there were bubbles forming where my needle enters the cart. Immedately after that and before the cart was full it started leaking ink from the vent on the top of the cart and then dripping ink from the exit port on the bottom. This all happened while the ink chamber was only half full. At stated before I inserted my needle slowly and filled slowly, just as I have always done. What could have caused such thing? After doing some quick cleanup of the cart I finished filling and reinserted the cart along with the rest back into the printer. Did a nozzle check with no problems and again this morning without incident. Pulled the cart to check for leaks and it is fine now. Any ideas what could have caused this?

 

[headphonesman]

.... Immedately after that and before the cart was full it started leaking ink from the vent on the top of the cart and then dripping ink from the exit port on the bottom. This all happened while the ink chamber was only half full.

I suspect that the top vent line was blocked within its length with ink (from an overfull sponge?) , you pushing ink into what was a nearly sealed container , your needle was virtually blocking your fill hole, your exit port was "blocked " with ink (pushed there by the pressure) , set up an intolerable pressure which found its quickest release via the vent line.
I had a magenta cart which always insisted on blowing bubbles at the exit port if i tried to push in too fast, probably for a similar reason.

(it helps if you talk to your difficult carts as you fill them , firmly but nicely..........)

 

[fish]

When you say "almost empty", you probably had too much ink in the sponge side. When you fill the tank, the ink displaces the air which forces the ink in the sponge side out the vent and fill hole. This is like trying to fill a full tank, the ink has to go somewhere.

 

[Mowerman90]

When you say "almost empty", you probably had too much ink in the sponge side. When you fill the tank, the ink displaces the air which forces the ink in the sponge side out the vent and fill hole. This is like trying to fill a full tank, the ink has to go somewhere.

This is how I refill all my carts. I'd rather "top'em off" than take the chance burning up the printhead because the software thought I had more ink left in the cart. When I say almost empty I mean that the ink chamber has maybe 1/8 in of ink left in it.

 

[jackson]

When you say "almost empty", you probably had too much ink in the sponge side. When you fill the tank, the ink displaces the air which forces the ink in the sponge side out the vent and fill hole. This is like trying to fill a full tank, the ink has to go somewhere.

This is how I refill all my carts. I'd rather "top'em off" than take the chance burning up the printhead because the software thought I had more ink left in the cart. When I say almost empty I mean that the ink chamber has maybe 1/8 in of ink left in it.

Your caution does you credit, but the printer telling me that it was time to refill is the least of it.
I fill each cart as prompted -only that one - even if others are getting low.
Leaving the head open while I remove carts that are low, it seemed to me that I ended up with bad nozzle test and multiple cleanings to get things back to normal.

 

[ghwellsjr]

You have a trade-off here. If you top off your cartridges before the printer tells you that a cartridge is empty, then you will be refilling while the sponge side of the cartridge is still saturated with ink and it is this old ink that starts exuding out of all three exits that it can find its way out of as you experienced. The reason for this is that when you pump ink into the reservoir, you are forcing the air that was in the reseroir into the sponge chamber and it's just like blowing into the sponge chamber to get ink out of it, so the saturated ink in the sponge gets expelled. The reason why it doesn't always happen for all your cartridges is that it just may happen that your other cartridges have a slight air path adjacent to the needle to allow the air to escape out the refill hole without forcing ink out.

The tradeoff is that if you wait to refill until the sponge is depleted of most of its ink, in other words, when the printer reports that it is empty, then when you refill the reservoir, it generally won't force ink out the three holes available for ink to escape.

There generally is no problem overfilling the sponge side of the cartridge except that ink left in the air vent can fill the wells in the serpentine path along the top of the cartridge which will compromise their function. You really should seal all the other two exit paths and turn the cartridge upsided down and squeeze the sides of the cartridge in an attempt to clean the ink out.

 

[Mowerman90]

Well, it all makes sense to me now, so I guess I'll just wait until the printer tells me that I've run out of ink and that be that. This is the kind of info that makes this forum such a great resourse.