In keeping with my new years resolution to be more practical this year, I’m sharing one of the best tips for home printing (ever!).
Today’s post doesn’t solve all your printing woes, but boy does this take care of a biggy – the supply and cost of ink.
Imagine having big tanks of ink sitting outside your printer with tubes feeding your cartridges an (almost) endless supply of ink. Sound like printing bliss?? Well that’s what CISS is.
How much is it? Well, for the price of a kit you’re probably looking at the cost of purchasing a set of the original brand cartridges. One website calculated I should expect to save $1200. We actually bought a DIY kit from a store in Thailand for $15 including 5 bottles of ink (about 100ml each). They were hesitant for us to buy it as it was rather tricky to set up, but Mark was insistent that he could – and he did. But it took the better half of the day (he could have saved a lot of time buying a kit that was already set up – and we wished we did).
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Before you order a CISS kit, read my tips below to save yourself some time and money:
- Make sure you buy a kit that is compatible with your printer. Not all printers can use CISS, so if you’re going to buy a printer for this purpose do your research first.
- I strongly encourage you to buy replacement ink cartridges with a compatible chip. It must have a chip otherwise you’re expected to pull if off the chip from your old cartridge and put it on the new one. (Our big mistake starting out was that we used Canon’s cartridges. It works, but the cartridges are too high so the lid doesn’t shut fully (we have shorter cartridges coming in the mail). We also have the problem that the chip is telling us the cartridge is empty – when it’s not. So we had to overwrite this by holding down the cancel button.
- Watch Youtube videos with the CISS system being installed on your printer. I have a very handy husband who I could fully trust to do this. With our printer we needed to cut some parts of the plastic inside the printer with a soldering iron – you may also have to do this with yours.
- Buy the kit assembled. You will find online lot of gear for CISS now. Buy something where you just need to put the ink in the tubs and put the new cartridges in the printer. If you buy the kit unassembled, like us, you might find there is a small opening at one of the joints which means there isn’t a vacuum anymore and ink will start leaking rapidly from your cartridge (this happened to us). We sealed the tubes using a hot glue gun which was a very tricky experience. (Plus I had no idea what was going on with the vacuum, suction, height on things, I was just an assistant doing what I was told!)
I stumbled across CISS when I was looking for “cheap ink” online. This lead me to a forum where one person mentioned CISS. Now that I’ve been using CISS for four months, I’m completely sold on the idea, and can’t ever see myself going back!
Have you been using the continuous ink supply system? What do you think? Or are you now ready to jump on board?!
☆☆☆☆ Find a CISS system for your printer on Amazon here ☆☆☆☆
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Now that you aren’t stressing about your ink supply, check out some of these awesome printables:
Mini Cake Pennant Bunting from karaspartyideas.com
Birthday Calendar from theprettyblog.com
Alphabetical Decor from thehandmadehome.net/
& one from my archives Recipe Cards from moi.
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