Reusing Epson 4800 Pro inkjet printer maintenance tank

When I first bought my Epson 4800 I was warned by a dealer that there was a chip on the maintenance tank and that the printer would stop working when it reached 0%, regardless of whether there was any space left in the tank. Instead of keeping a spare in stock I resolved to reuse the tank as a small contribution to not wasting the world’s resources.

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The maintenance tank is the drawer in the bottom right hand corner of the printer, just below the right hand bank of ink cartridges. Its only purpose (that I can determine) is to catch the ink that is expelled from the system when the machine does nozzle cleans or purges the lines during changeovers between photo and matt inks etc, and to catch any overflow from puddle cleaning. It is simply an oblong plastic tank, filled with absorbent material covered with a removable plastic grid; and it also has a chip on it which the printer uses to keep track of how much it thinks it has filled the tank up. When it reaches 0% you need a new tank or the printer stops working, regardless of whether everything else is fine – or so I am lead to believe as I have never run it down to 0%.

Now I resent having to pay out £20 or more for the privilege of pouring expensive ink into a tank which could easily be reused, but Epson decree should be thrown away, so I decided to find a way round the system and reuse the tank.

Since I had no idea when I bought the printer how long the tank would take to fill and I had noticed that some suppliers quite often ran out of spare tanks I decided to buy a chip re-setter to make sure that I could carry on printing if need be. The easiest place for me get one was on eBay.

I reset the chip when it arrived just to check that it worked and it did. I then reset the chip when the tank was about 75% full and recently decided to reuse the tank properly. I figured that all I needed to do was take off the grid, remove and throw away the ink soaked absorbent material in the tank and replace it with something else absorbent – while I suspect that this is not strictly necessary as all that is needed is a tank to catch the ink I wanted to avoid splashes etc both during use and at changeover. After a bit of thought I decided that the easiest thing to use was nappy material, so I bought the cheapest I could find at the supermarket.

Tools and materials needed:

• Pair of surgical gloves
• Blunt small screwdriver
• Chip re-setter
• Ink tight waste disposal bag
• Long nosed pliers
• Clean up cloth
• Newspaper
• 3 nappies

The photo below shows the tank when it was taken out. I was expecting the ink to look black, but for some reason it was dark green.


Here is the process I used to refurbish and reuse the maintenance tank.

1. First carefully prise off the plastic grid from the top of the tank using the blunt small screwdriver – it unclips at various points all around the tank.


2. The absorbent material in the tank is tightly packed, so use the long nosed pliers to pull it out and dump it into the waste disposal bag.


3. Clean around the inside of the tank to remove any unabsorbed ink and you should end up with an empty tank and a clean grid (see photo below).



4. Then peel the (hopefully) waterproof outer off the nappies, otherwise the tank will not absorb much (I found that three roughly filled the tank without packing them in too tightly, but sizes will vary) and pack them into the tank. Finish off with a layer of the permeable inside of the nappy upper most in the tank – for neatness and to make sure that the nappy material does not go anywhere it shouldn’t.


5. Clip back on the plastic grid (see photo below).



6. Then use the chip re-setter to re-set the tank chip to 100% - in my case the spring loaded prongs need to be aligned with the contacts on the chip and gently pressed against the chip (see photo below). The LED on the top of the re-setter flashes red for a 3 or 4 seconds then turns green.



7. Reinstall the tank into the printer.

This worked fine for me and took about half an hour the first time I tried it.
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