Rejuvenate Your Canon's Waste Ink Tank

Don Bradbury revives a Canon printer that reported its "waste ink tank full"

Canon incorporate into many (all?) of their ink jet printers what they refer to as a waste ink tank. It's a sort of buffer between the cartridge and the print paper that accommodates ink that isn't used during the print cycle, and after protracted use of the printer it fills up, giving warnings of impending failure if you don't return the printer to Canon for expert (for which read "expensive") help.

You may get, as we did on our venerable BJC-50, a flashing charge/error light, and a buzzer sounding five times to indicate this condition. You can usually get a few more copies out of the printer, when it reports this situation, before it stops printing altogether, but ultimately you will be obliged to do something about it, Either that or ditch the printer and buy another. Could this really be stealth redundancy? After all, other printer manufacturers manage without waste ink tanks that give this trouble.

Our BJC-50 case

Well, this Canon BJC-50 that we have here, still giving excellent service after a lot of use, finally hit the buffers some time ago. We decided to try tackling the situation ourselves, and after a bit of research on the web, here's what we did. The exact procedure will depend somewhat on the model.

First, remove the rechargeable battery, then raise the cartridge cover , switch on the printer and unplug the power cord when the ink cartridge is in a position to be accessed. You might need a couple of tries to achieve this. Carefully drag the cartridge and carrier to the centre of the bay for easy access if you have to. Remove the cartridge. Remove the print head unit. Clean both with soft tissue until no more ink oozes out, and clean the adjacent plastic. You might have to be inventive, to cover the case of the specific printer model. Reassemble, and then proceed as follows.

1. Unplug the power cord
2. Remove the rechargeable battery (we love the BJC-50 for it's power options)
3. While holding down the Resume button, plug in the power cord.
4. After a delay of two seconds, press the power button.
5. Release both buttons immediately the printer starts up.
6. Press and hold down the Cartridge, Resume, and Power buttons together.
7. After the beeps, release all three buttons together. The power LED should then be off; the charger LED should light orange.

Now for the specific counter reset code entry:

8. Press the cartridge button 16 times. The power LED and the charger LED should light alternately after each press of the cart button.
9. Press the Resume button, at which point the printer should power itself down.
10. Replace the battery pack.
11. Power on, and put the your printer through a couple of head cleaning cycles.
12. Clean the unavoidable ink stains on your fingers, or preferably use rubber gloves from the start.

There's lots of comment and help available on the web to tackle Canon's waste ink tank problem, some of it specific to particular models. Have a browse around before you start tinkering. Some models appear to have more accessible waste ink pads than others, but a general cleanup will often do the trick.

In conclusion

No guarantees, but this procedure has restored life to our BJC-50 and it could do the same for your Canon printer. It's worth a try. Your particular printer will have it's own Canon-specific reset code, and for that you should trawl the web with the printer model input in your Browser, in our case, "BJC-50 waste ink tank", or more generally, "Canon waste ink tank".

Messy? Sure, but infinitely less expensive than a visit to a Canon agent!

Don Bradbury