What is protection counter?

“Why do I get this problem?” you may ask. Simple answer, it’s by design.The printer has to make sure that it can print smoothly without any missing white line, so sometimes the printer perform the head cleaning. When the printer performs the head cleaning, it flush the ink into a waste pad.
There is some container at the bottom of your printer that has a big sponge to absorb these ink. Of course, the sponge has a limited capasity to absorb the ink. If this situation happen, the ink start to leak from your printer and trust me you don’t like this situation. It’s really disaster.How to prevent that? Fortunately, the manufacturer aware of this and introduce the concept of “protection counter”.

The printer will “count” the amount of ink flows to waste pad everytime you perform head cleaning. Once the counter reach the maximum value, the printer stop to print anymore. Depends on the printer model, some printers button will blink alternately (red and green). Modern printer display the error message in the lcd panel showing that some parts of your printer has reach its life span. Why it’s happen? It’s to protect you from the disaster that I mentioned above. The manufacture has done a good job, what do you think?

From my experience, the sponge has not saturated yet. I think the manufacture doesn’t want to take risk to give you a disaster, so they prevent the printer to print anymore earlier than it should. Again for your own good.

What you can do now? You only have 2 options here. First, buy a new printer, second is to fix it.

If you buy a new printer, please consider not to buy the “entry level” printer such as Epson Stylus C45, CX1500 unless you seldom print or feel suit your need. Based on my experience, the printer mentioned above has a limited area for waste pad due to the printer size.

If you want to fix it, quick solution is to reset the protection counter. Some printers have this feature build in such as Epson Stylus Photo R300/R310, RX510, etc. What you need to do is to press some combination of the available buttons and the printer will reset the protection counter by itself.

If your printer is still under warranty, bring it to the service centre. They will change the sponge and reset the protection counter for you.

Alternatively, you can try to reset it by using the software, SSC Service Utility for Epson Stylus Printer. Click here to download. Read their disclaimer, some printers may not working at all.

There are some risks if you use this software to reset the protection counter

The sponge is supposed to be changed because it will not absorb the ink anymore.
Use this software may void the printer warranty
Please remember that you should change/clean your waste pad before you reset the protection counter. It prevents you a disaster.

Source: Refilling Cartridge