Epson Expression Premium Waste Ink Pad Replacement / Cleaning

Many expression premium printers have similar waste ink pads. Epson has 2 part numbers. First one is 1612118 and the second one is 1611102. You can always use the 1611102 in your replacements. They are often the same price and 1611102 has larger capacity.

Why Epson has two different parts? That is a matter of pricing. The smaller waste ink pad will be filled quicker and you will need to replace your printer more often. Epson has the smaller type in cheaper models, such as XP-540. At least mine had the smaller type.

Removing Waste Ink Pad Container

First you have to start by removing the two black screws holding a plastic trimpiece.

After that, you can simply lift it up and remove. You will gain access to two silver screws under it. Unfortunately I forgot to take picture of them :) The one on the right is deep inside the device so you may want to use a magnetic screwdriver head or a magnetic pickup tool.

After removing the plastic piece, you will gain access to one more screw. One was already visible. You may need to remove the paper tray completely to see it.

In this printer all the visible screws are black and others are silver colored. Once you remove these screws, you can also remove the lower cover piece.

You will gain access to one more silver screw. This screw and one under the device holds the waste ink pad container in place. The screw under the printer is shorter.

You may tilt the printer when doing this. However, ink may leak if container is too full. It should not be too full. But you never know.

The safer way is to put the printer on top a straight table and leave the container outside the table. As you can see, printer's legs are inside anyway.

You need a screwdriver to lift the plastic slightly to be able to pull the ink container down. Once the container is removed, you can clearly see the ink outlet.

Cleaning or Changing The Sponge

Normally all you need is to dry the sponges. Once they are dry, they should be able to absorb nearly as much liquid as they did originally. But you can also wash them.

One important thing to remember is to not give in to temptation of squeezing them. They will be flattened and won't work as well anymore.

The best way to clean them is simply putting them under running water until no ink comes out.

You can then dry the sponges on a heater or let them dry out outside etc. Make sure to not leave them on a surface which may absorb the ink. Because there comes out small amounts of ink even after through rinsing.

The installation is reverse of removal :) Here is the end result.

How Much Liquid Was Inside?

When I removed the ink container, first thing I did was to measure it's weight.

It weighted 148.2g then I weighted the container with washed, rinsed and dried pads again.

The weight is 61.6g. This tells me that the container was holding ~85g of liqud.

Some Experiments

I wanted to figure out if I could replace the pads with another material. The most logical choice was "magic sponge". It is super absorbent and easy to cut into shape.

 It was easy to install them to place.

The original sponge was 3.5cm high. But I used even smaller 3cm high magic sponge setting in my experiment.

First the dry weight. It was 57.2g

I have first filled the container with water, then turned it upside down until it stopped dripping. This way I could estimate how much liquid the sponge could absorb.

Wet weight 153.9g. So it managed to absorb ~95g easily. That is a pretty decent result considering I used a smaller piece of sponge.

By the way, you can literally buy 100 pieces of 10 x 6 x 2 cm sized magic sponge for less than 5euro! The container has six ~1cm thick pieces so you can use 3 sponges for 1 refill!

Below is outline of the pads (not to scale!) the last piece in the drawing is the middle part which has 3 of same pieces. Total number of pieces is 6.

The height of the smaller waste ink pad is 33mm and the container holds up to 58mm safely.