The Shed

If your printer won’t print after several cleaning cycles, and you have plenty of ink in the cartridge, then either your print head or the cartridge is clogged – here’s the solution.

I have been refilling ink cartridges for over 12 years. Refilling ink cartridges myself, with good quality ink, has saved me heaps of money and never harmed my Epsom and Canon printers, no matter what the printer manufacturers say. I hear that printers are sold almost at cost and that the profit is all in the ink cartridge refills.

Eventually all printheads clog up. Bubblejet ink is water based. If you can remove your printhead it’s possible to unclog it – simply remove the printhead, remove the cartridges and then soak the printhead in hot water to dissolve the dried up residue. I then use a spray bottle and spray through the tiny printhead holes as firmly as possible, then give it another soak in hot water. Dry thoroughly then refit everything and perform a cleaning cycle or two, then test print.

This works 9 times out of 10. If not, then it’s most likely the actual cartridge is blocked.

Eventually the cartridge has been used for so long that the foam pad at the ink exit gets clogged. When this happens, no amount of cleaning the printhead will help. A temporary fix is to blow v hard through the foam pad, but obviously it’s time to buy a new cartridge and start again.

I now run a continuous ink system from http://rihac.com.au/  it’s easy to use, cheap and no more ink stained fingers. Each ink bottle holds 100ml of ink- that’s more than a years average use.