Last week I thought I found the holy grail. Print cartridge refill kids…and on sale for $7.50 at the local pharmacy. Don’t you know that that is where you can get your best office supplies? So I just filled my black cartridge yesterday and printed a page and it was awesome! This morning, my packing slips are printing in purple ink which tells me that there is no black coming out and my color cartridge is doing it’s best to mix a believable black.
The reason I’m telling you all of this is because I found something really nifty, if it worked, that is. I knew you could clean your print cartridge heads. I didn’t know you could “intermediate” clean them which I guess is a deeper clean…maybe they pull out the Windex in there or something. But the coolest thing (at least I thought so) was that you can “prime” your cartridge. How many times (am I the only one?) does your cartridge seem to dry up and you think, “if I could just get that ink flowing again I’d be ok.” Ok. Maybe it’s just me.
But that still isn’t helping so I’m off to read the instructions on how to reset the ink level. (Is this really saving me money???) It’s a conspiracy, isn’t it? I mean, how can that much ink cost over $25 but the refills for 6 fillings cost $7.50? And if you say it’s because the plastic print cartridge with the computer sensor in it I have to disagree with that too. Have you seen some of these McDonald’s toys these days? They have plastic, computer chips, light and batteries and they’re available ‘free’ in a $3.99 Happy Meal. Tell me they can’t make a print cartridge that is less than $25!
Ok, I’m getting down now.
UPDATE: Dude! It worked. Sorry, couldn’t resist the dude thing. And my black print is the juiciest I’ve ever seen it!
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Cartridges are definitely a conspiracy! I was discussing this today with someone else and they said the same thing about being able to clean the nozzle on the cartridge!! We could be millionaires if we came up with a printer that has four containers with simple caps on them and it let’s you put the print nozzle in the dishwasher:) You buy big bottles of ink and pour more in when you need it!!
Steve (the beadnerd’s husband)
Lori Says:Â Get on that, would you?
What would be really nice is being able to really clean our printers out. However, most won’t even open up enough for us to do that. I bought a new Epson. I put in a new Epson print cartridge but did not use it right away. Thus, I did not find out that the cartridge was defective and all of the ink ran into the printer and dried. The printer is toast because I cannot get into it to get all of the old, dried up ink out and of course the warranty was no good for dried up ink. We are now going for the big guns to try to salvage it and putting some soapy, wet rags into the bottom to try to get the dried stuff moist enough to get it out.
In the mean time I went back to HP which does far better pictures and I’ll get to cleaning the printer when I can take time from beadwork.
Happy beading all!
That would just tick me off! Just like when you get a new cartridge, use it for a couple days and then you get an error that tells you that the ‘print cartridge has stalled’ which only means that the chip in it is corrupt. Now what?
Good luck with your cleaning endeavor. You’re not alone…we feel your pain.