top fill clearance

[stratman]

It looks like if you print black and white every 2 days and color every 4 days you can beat the purges. And maybe, if you can refill without changing cartridges, you can again beat the purges then too.

One interesting thing is that it looks like you could beat the excessive ink use even with OEM ink.

These are scheduled maintenance. Even if you never take the cartridge out of the print head to refill you will eventually be required to disable ink level monitoring or reset an ARC chip or a "regular" chip.

 

[Trigger 37]

The reason that I have recommended to never turn your printer off and always print one document a day or at least inside of 24 hour is to avoid these cleaning cycles. Many people don't know what a "Gram" of is. Because I've torn apart and repaired so many Canon printers,..and tested them up on blocks I can tell you that you can print 2 or more pages of black and the same for color and still not come close to the amount of ink in one cleaning cycle. The best thing to print is just a nozzle test print. This not only uses all inks and colors but also shows you the complete status of your head AND THE INK CARTS.

 

[Emulator]

Those time intervals seem unnecessarily specific, right up to a year. If you leave it two years, does it give up?! Does the printer have its own battery supported clock? Or does it use the computers clock?

 

[ThrillaMozilla]

Stratman, I'm talking about avoiding the purge cycles, not resetting.

On my HP printer, I can take a cartridge out for some minutes and put it back in without initiating a purge cycle! That's time enough to refill it and reset it (if it were possible to reset HP cartridges). According to the schedule, you can avoid the periodic maintenance cycles. And if you refill the same cartridge, maybe you can also avoid the maintenance cycles when refilling.

The idea is that you can no only save a lot of ink, but you can also prolong the life of your printer. (Good point, Trigger 37. Thanks for posting that. I've been trying to work that out for my HP printer without documentation.)

 

[stratman]

Thrilla:

I thought we were talking about Canon printers.

As far as I know, there is no way to delay or disrupt a Canon printer maintenance cycle. If the scheduled time passes then a maintenance cycle for that prescribed time frame is initiated. If a cartridge is deemed removed from the print head by whatever fashion, including and ARC chip reset, then a maintenance cycle is initiated. I imagine you can "fool" the printer about cartridge removals by using ARC chips that forever show full and either top filling or using a CISS, but the power to the printer must always stay on and there must not be any other mechanism by which Canon keeps track of ink levels. You will, however, still be subject to scheduled maintenance cycles.

This is my understanding. I welcome different empirical conclusions.

 

[stratman]

Those time intervals seem unnecessarily specific, right up to a year. If you leave it two years, does it give up?! Does the printer have its own battery supported clock? Or does it use the computers clock?

The printer has non-volatile EEPROM. This is why you can unplug the printer, plug it back in and then, after entering Service Mode, print out the EEPROM data as well as alter it (such as reset the waste ink counter).

I don't know how Canon handles maintenance after the first year but my printer's routing seems to be unchanged for years now. I've not paid attention to this but it could be the cycle repeats itself.

 

[ThrillaMozilla]

As far as I know, there is no way to delay or disrupt a Canon printer maintenance cycle.

Are you sure? The way I read the schedule, you can, and Trigger says you can.

Maybe you can't avoid one when you change cartridges (although I can with HP), and it's maybe not worth the bother to avoid the level 0 ones, but it appears that you may be able to avoid all the others.

 

[stratman]

Thrilla:

Now I am not sure.

It makes sense that the longer it is in between cleanings and a print job that more ink would be purged. However, what if you never go for longer than 119 hours in between print jobs ? Only the Black is purged for times under 120 hours. How would that help prevent clogs with the color cartridges if all you print is Plain Paper monochrome Text, for instance?

A la Bill Clinton's whatever is is, I suppose we need to know precisely what (All in sequence) and "...till the start of the next printing" mean.

If the Timer Cleanings are sequential based on time in between cleanings, relying only on sending a print job to the printer to begin the cleaning purge of ink, then you may be stuck with the entire scheduled cleaning listed in the Service Manual no matter how much you print in between cleanings. You can print as much as you want within one of the scheduled Timer Clean hour time frames, but the first time you go to print in the next time frame, you will initiate the cleaning purge of ink for that cycle.

For example, a scheduled Timer Cleaning event occurs somewhere in the 120 to 336 hours time frame. No matter you print every day or power off your printer, the next time you go to print in the next scheduled Timer Cleaning time frame - 336 to 504 hours - a Timer Cleaning will occur with the amounts of ink purged based on that schedule.

Could a manually initiated cleaning break the Timer Cleaning schedule?

What does overriding ink monitoring do to the scheduled Timer Cleanings?

I am more inclined to support your position now but am still not thoroughly convinced.

 

[The Hat]

I tried to explain how to cut down on the severity of cleaning cycles rather
than the amount of cycles in my earlier thread and was miss understood for it.

Whether you leave the power on or off doesnt seem to matter regarding cleaning cycles or for that matter
disabling the ink monitoring or how much you print in a day or a week.

If you wish to reduce the amount of ink purged (some say wasted) then this can be achieved by
simply replacing any cartridge before you get the low ink warning symbol on your screen.

It wont stop or prevent a purge cycle for the replaced cartridge far from it but it does cut down
on the length of the cycle, and a further saving can be had if you change more than one cartridge at the same time.

You can check this out 3 ways first by changing your cartridge when it shows low ink and noting the length of time a purge cycle takes,
next at the out of ink warning sign and also at say half full, these steps will give 3 different timing cycles
so the one that has the lowest down time has to be the best.

My printers also do several short cleaning cycles in the middle of a print run which bear no relation to time or ink levels in any of its cartridges,
this I imagine is to insure that the output remains constant with no loss of quality during operation but I welcome this interruption whole hearty.

Another false economy when faced with poor output is to do a deep head clean or a head alignment
instead of just a standard head clean followed again by another nozzle check.

A deep head clean maybe needed sometimes but it is the most wasteful of all when it comes to your ink,
much more than any other purge cycle so try and avoid using it.

Canon help file suggests when it should be used but thats only under the assumption your printer is using new OEM cartridges and not refills.

If however there is no improvement in the nozzle check then the most probable cause of the poor output
is usually down to a cartridge/ink problem and not a clogged print head at all.

So try to avoid unnecessary head cleans or printing anything other than nozzle checks till you solve the problem,
dont try to save ink at the expense of your print head, because that is false economy.

While I am on my soap box I should say dont be tempted to use homemade 1 coloured strips in any application
to test your ink flow UNLESS you have a perfect 100% nozzle check FIRST.

After all of this its Happy Printing you guys..

 

[ThrillaMozilla]

Only the Black is purged for times under 120 hours. How would that help prevent clogs with the color cartridges if all you print is Plain Paper monochrome Text, for instance?

The second footnote says that black and color are counted separately. So you would need to print something with all colors, including photo (dye) black if you have that. You may be right, though. The schedule does say that cleaning is based on time since the last cleaning. I still think it's worth a try, though, considering the possible payoff.

The Hat, I'm sure your information is good (for Canon, but does not apply to my HP cartridges), but I was hoping to additionally beat those most frequent cleanings, if possible.