Did you know it’s possible to get a refill kit to let you refill most printer ink cartridges? Basically what it consists of is some ink in bottles, a syringe (or set of syringes one for each colour ink), and some instructions on what to do. As you can probably imagine this is a lot cheaper to produce, and therefore cheaper to buy than a new ink cartridge and so in terms of saving money is well worth doing.

Ebay – ink cartridge refills

Most ink cartridges can be refilled at least once, and if you look on the packaging of the refill kit, it usually lists details of the cartridges you can use the kit with and then will either tell you in a leaflet with the product, or on their website how to actually go about refilling the cartridge.

As an example, a set of new colour cartridges for a printer could cost you anywhere from £20-£60 for the three depending on what brand you are buying and where you buy them from. Whereas a colour refill kit is usually between £4 and £10 which is a pretty big saving.

It can be a bit messy refilling a printer cartridge if you’ve never done it before, I know Hubby and I both got in a bit of a mess when we first did it, so I’d advise wearing an old top, putting some newspaper, and popping on a pair of disposable gloves until you’re used to doing it. (Hubby has got so good at doing this now that he can do all three colour cartridges in our printer in 10 mins).

I wouldn’t suggest that you use a refill EVERY time, particularly on printers like HP where the print head is on the ink cartridge because if you do, you will find that the print quality will get worse over time. However, refilling every other, or even 2 out of 3 times the ink needs changing will probably be fine.

If you don’t fancy giving refilling a go yourself or are worried about the mess, then you could always try either going to a ‘refilling station’ in a shop like Woolworths, or buying recycled ink cartridges. These are nothing like as expensive as a brand new cartridge, but not as cheap as refilling yourself obviously.

A few good places to look for both ink refills and recycled ink cartridges are cartridge monkey, ink factory and inkclub all of who do quite a good range in new and recycled cartridges for many brands of printer, and also refill kits to suit most people too.