Adventures in learning how to treat our Earth more gently and our bodies well, while still enjoying a life filled with good things.
Continuous ink supply systems reduce waste and save money
By Coralie, on February 25th, 2009 at 10.24 AM
Category: 
Excess packaging is something that bothers me. (Especially so after reading
Printer companies are in the business of selling ink cartridges, not printers
Couldn’t printer companies come up with a way for people to buy their ink in bulk, somehow? Of course they could, but why would they? I don’t have figures, but I would bet that they make barely anything on selling the printer compared to the amount of money they make selling expensive ink cartridge after expensive ink cartridge for the life of the printer. I always preferred to buy quality, brand name cartridges and if I was lucky enough to find a discount seller, I’d get away with under $100 to get my printer pumping out colourful pages again. I was never one to believe the printer’s message that it was running low, either. I ran my printer (frugally, I will admit) for about four or five months after it began telling me it was running low. But I’ve heard stories of the newer style cartridges with computer chips that stop the printer from doing any more printing when it deems that it’s run out of ink, yet when tests have been done, the cartidges still have quite some life left in them. And what average person can tell if their printer is lying to them? You can’t see inside the cartridge.
Many people swear by refilling their ink cartidges, which certainly solves the packaging and waste issue, but you want to ensure you’re getting quailty ink so that it doesn’t ruin your printer. Others avoid the huge cost of brand name cartridges by buying generic brands, but again, you want to make sure you get quailty, and you’ve still got the issue of all that waste.
Back to old fashioned ink wells
A good friend of mine recently bought himself something for his printer which I’d never heard of previously, yet when I saw it in action, I was impressed and knew I had to get one for my own printer. It’s called a continuous ink supply systyem, or a CISS. It’s almost like an old fashioned ink well but with much more advanced technology. It feeds ink to the printer via a ribbon of skinny tubes. As soon as I had the chance, I purchased one designed for my own printer, a Canon PIXMA MP160. Since his was working so well, I bought mine from the same place: rihac.
A CISS for each printer
Each CISS, made specifically to fit your printer, comes with cartridges designed to fit in exactly the same way as the original brand name cartridges, except that each has a ribbon of tubing hanging off it which is connected to an ink reservoir. If you have a printer that takes chipped cartridges, you can elect to have the chips pre-fitted, or, if you feel game, you can save some money by removing the chips from the original cartridges and fitting them to the CISS cartridges yourself. Mine are not chipped so I didn’t have to make the choice, but I hear it can be quite tricky.
Installation is relatively easy
Since chips weren’t in the equation for me, I can only comment on how easy it is to install an unchipped CISS. Installation requires some patience, but it’s not complex at all as long as you carefully follow the instruction manual and don’t try to take short cuts. Everything you need to prepare and fit the CISS is in the box, including spares of some small items. The only thing I had to supply was a newspaper to put the CISS on during preparation, and tissues to clean up any mess. The small amount of preparation required before installing it needs to be done only the one time, as long as your CISS isn’t doing more travelling such as when it was posted to you. It was actually kind of fun playing with the supplied syringe and hypodermic needle to prepare my CISS. The needle is required to draw air out of the ink reservoirs if you need to prime the system.
After switching the travel plugs with air filters (it sounds like I’m talking about a car, now), it was ready to go into the printer. It took some fiddling around with the tubing to get the right length before sticking it down with a clip on the inside of the printer, but once that and the other clip was placed, the job was done. It took me about an hour to do it all, from the opening of the box to printing my first test page. If you do yours without the help of a five year old, you might be even quicker.
Save heaps of money
Even with the initial cost of the CISS, I’m still getting extreme value. The ink reservoirs come already filled and provide about four times the amount of ink I would get in a large capacity black ink brand name cartridge (24 mls or .81 of an ounce) and more than ten times the amount of ink I’d get for each colour in a large capacity colour brand name cartridge (only 7 mls, or .24 of an ounce, of each colour). Refill bottles of 100 mls (3.38 ounces) of each colour ink for my printer will cost me me only AUD $46.80, plus shipping. According to rihac, I would pay about AUD $1250 at current prices to get that much ink in brand name cartridges. I’m assuming their calculations are based on large capacity cartridges. My rough calculations—based on the discounted price I paid more than a year ago for a pair of large capacity brand name cartridges—show that I would have paid at least AUD $880 to get the equivalent amount of ink. Either way, the savings are massive.
Things to watch out for
- Read ahead in the manual before you make any moves. I had a small moment of panic during the preparation phase. After removing the travel plug, as instructed, and sucking ink out of the air balance chamber, I removed the ink reservoir filler plug to squirt the excess ink into the ink reservoir as was suggested .. and only then did I see the next instruction (helpfully printed after an image on the page) which warned me, in red writing, to never have the filler plug removed at the same time as the travel plug. Since my little one was right there (and since it wasn’t devastating, but only required me to repeat the step again) my response at reading the red writing was simply, ‘Oh.’
- Check that you have all the correct parts. Compare what you have in the box with what’s shown in the manual. One of the tubing clips already fitted on the tubing wasn’t the right type for the inside of my printer. Fortunately, an extra clip of the correct type in the small bag of spare parts took care of this and I just switched them.
- Be prepared for a settling in time. There may be a few days or so of settling in or slight adjustment needed. I found that I hadn’t allowed quite enough length of tubing between the cartridges and the first self adhesive clip. The clip came off, causing my printer to give me a persistent paper jam error until I looked inside and found the tubing resting on some parts at the bottom of the printer. This was easily remedied by giving the tubing a bit more length and sticking the clip on again.
If you read the manual carefully, allow plenty of time to finish the job, and make sure you’re working over an easily cleaned surface, you’ll be fine. I’ve never done anything like this before and I didn’t have any troubles. I even managed to stay relatively clean and only ended up with a small amount of ink on my fingers.
A brilliant system
I wish I’d known about continuous ink supply systems a long time ago. I’ll never go back to normal ink cartridges. Even when it’s eventually time for a new printer, I’ll go right ahead and install a CISS as soon as the original cartridges start to make noises about getting low on ink.
Visit: rihac
RRP: AUD $159 (for my Canon PIXMA MP160)
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That’s a good use of all that empty space in those printers
We just got a new Canon inkjet, with chipped cartridges unfortunately. For now we’ll just see how fast it goes through the cartridges. We don’t really print that often, so they’ll probably last some time. But to be frank, I don’t see myself building a CISS into it soon.
I don’t tend to print all that often, either, but even having to go out only once a year and pay as much as they want to charge for those cartridges irks me.
I meant to make one more comment about your mention of the empty space in the printers. The ink reservoirs of the CISS doesn’t actually go inside the printer. Only the CISS cartridges and the ribbon are inside. The rest is all outside the printer.