The consumable nobody sold you, and the counter that ends the machine what the ink pad is, what each maker publishes when it fills, and how to tell a ten dollar part from a dead printer
A printer that prints perfectly well announces that a part has reached the end of its service life, and then it stops. Nothing is jammed, no cartridge is empty, and the output from the last job was fine. What has happened is that a counter reached a number the firmware will not go past. The part behind that counter is the one consumable no shop sold you with the printer, and on some machines you can replace it yourself for less than a single cartridge, while on others the maker will only send you to service. Which of those two you own settles what happens next, and almost nobody checks until the printer has already stopped.
What the pad is, and why a working printer stops
Every printer that squirts liquid ink through a head has to deal with the ink that never reaches paper. It is pulled through the nozzles when the machine primes itself, flushed out during cleaning cycles, and thrown past the edge of the sheet whenever you print without a margin. That ink has to go somewhere inside the case, and where it goes is an absorbent pad or a plastic box packed with absorbent material.
Epson's own statement page describes the part precisely. It says there are a number of porous pads in the printer that collect, distribute and contain ink that is not used on printed pages, and that ink is collected by these pads during the initial setup of the product, during cleaning cycles, and when printing borderless photographs. Canon's manual puts the same idea in one line under support code 5B00: ink used during cleaning and other processes is captured in the ink absorber, and the printer will not be able to print when the ink absorber is full.
What surprises most people is that the printer has no sensor measuring how wet that pad is. It runs a counter. Each prime and each cleaning cycle adds an estimated volume to a running total, as does every borderless page, and when the total crosses a threshold the firmware stops. The stop is deliberate, because saturated absorbent material leaks, and ink that escapes the pad ends up on the desk or inside the electronics. The counter is therefore set to fire before the pad is physically full, which is why a machine can hit the limit while its pad still looks capable of holding more.
Two things follow from that. Because it is a counter and not a measurement, heavy cleaning fills it far faster than heavy printing does. And because it is a counter, resetting it is technically possible and physically meaningless. The ink is still in the pad.
A box you can buy, or a sponge you cannot: the split that decides everything
Two machines can show the same class of message and have completely different outcomes, because makers build this part in two ways.
The first is a maintenance box, sometimes called a maintenance cartridge. It is a sealed plastic container with the absorbent material inside it and a chip on the side, it clips into a slot you can reach, and it is sold as a consumable with its own part number. Epson's manuals describe it plainly: the maintenance box stores ink that gets flushed from the system during print head cleaning, and when it is at the end of its service life you replace it. Epson's user guides go further and settle the argument about whose problem it is, saying that the need for replacement of the pad does not mean the product has ceased to operate in accordance with its specifications, that the Epson warranty does not cover the cost of this replacement, and that it is a user serviceable part. Canon sells the same idea as a maintenance cartridge for some MegaTank models and describes the MC-G02 as designed to be easily replaceable by users.
The second is a fixed pad. The absorbent material sits in the bottom of the chassis, fed by drain tubes, and reaching it means taking the printer apart. There is no part number on a shelf for the average model and no consumer procedure in the manual. When the counter fills on one of these, the documented answer from the maker is service.
The design is not a brand rule, which is the trap. Epson builds both: plenty of WorkForce and EcoTank models take a box, and plenty of Expression models have pads inside. Canon builds both, with a replaceable maintenance cartridge on part of the MegaTank range and internal absorbers on the rest of PIXMA. The only reliable way to know is to look up your exact model number on the maker's own supplies page and see whether a maintenance box or maintenance cartridge is listed as an accessory for it. Do that now, while the printer is still working, because the answer determines whether a future stoppage costs you ten dollars or costs you the printer.
What each maker says when the counter fills
The wording differs by brand, and so does what happens to you afterwards.
| Brand | What it calls the part | What the panel says | Who replaces it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Epson | Ink pads, or a maintenance box on models that have one | Ink pad at the end of its service life, service required, E-11 or E-12 | You, if the model takes a box. Epson service or a certified technician if it is pads |
| Canon | Ink absorber, or a maintenance cartridge on some MegaTank models | Support code 1700 or 1701 first, then 5B00. Code 1726 on maintenance cartridge models | You, if the model takes a maintenance cartridge. Canon service if it is an absorber |
| Brother | Ink absorber box and flushing box | Machine Error 46 | An engineer. Brother does not publish a user procedure |
| HP | Service fluid container on PageWide Managed business models | No consumer facing waste ink counter message on the home range | You, on the business models that have one |
Epson gives you the warning in plain language: a part inside your printer is at the end of its service life, service is required. On panel models it appears as E-11 or E-12. Epson's statement page lists three options and no others: contact Epson service about its ink pad replacement service, which Epson says includes shipping and packaging round trip; work with a local certified technician to replace the ink pad; or use Epson's recycling program and move on. Epson also says most users will never see the message under normal use, and that it tends to reach high volume users or people who have had the printer for many years. On models with a maintenance box, none of that applies, and you simply buy the box.
Canon gives you a two stage warning, which is genuinely useful if you act on the first one. Support codes 1700 and 1701 mean the ink absorber is almost full, and Canon's manual tells you to press the printer's OK button to continue printing and to contact your nearest Canon service center to request a repair. The machine keeps working. Then comes 5B00, where Canon's wording changes to a stop: if you intend to print or copy, the ink absorber should be replaced, contact Canon for repair as soon as possible. On MegaTank models that use a maintenance cartridge, Canon publishes support code 1726 for a full maintenance cartridge along with a replacement procedure, and that one you handle yourself.
Brother is the shortest answer on this page. Brother's support FAQ for Machine Error 46 says the ink absorber pad is full and needs replacing, that you will need an engineer to replace it, and that out of warranty machines should contact Brother Customer Service. Brother also states that the absorbers can control enough ink for the expected life of the machine, which tells you how the design was intended: the pad is meant to outlast the printer rather than be serviced during it.
HP is the outlier, and honestly so. On its home inkjet range HP does not publish a consumer facing waste ink counter message in the way the other three do, and there is no HP equivalent of E-11 or 5B00 to look up. HP does sell a user replaceable waste container on the business side, the PageWide service fluid container, listed in HP's own parts catalogue and documented in its PageWide Managed user guides with a stated behaviour: when it is completely full, printing stops until the container is replaced. If your HP is a home OfficeJet, ENVY or DeskJet and it has stopped, look at the messages HP does document for those models rather than assuming a waste counter, because an ink system failure or a printhead message on those machines is a different fault with a different fix.
What fills the counter, and the habits that fill it fastest
Cleaning fills the pad far faster than printing does, and most of the cleaning a printer does is not cleaning you asked for.
Brother publishes the clearest list of automatic cleaning triggers of any of the four, in the same FAQ that covers Machine Error 46, and it is worth reading even if you own another brand because the behaviour is broadly similar across inkjets. Brother says the machine will automatically clean the print head when the ink cartridges are first installed, performing an initial purge to fill the ink tubes. When the machine is powered off it cannot keep track of how long the power has been off, so it runs a cleaning cycle when you turn it back on. It cleans before the first print job after a paper jam has been cleared, to remove paper dust that could damage the head. It cleans if the head was not capped properly in standby. It cleans when an empty cartridge was swapped while the machine was powered off. And it cleans if the machine has been powered on with no use for 45 days, to stop ink drying in the head.
Read that list again as a list of habits. Switching the printer off at the wall every night converts an idle machine into one that purges ink on every startup. So does pulling the plug to clear a fault. So does replacing a cartridge with the power off. None of these is dramatic on its own and all of them are free to stop doing.
The other big filler is the deep clean people run when output looks bad. A cleaning cycle is one of the most expensive things a printer can do in ink terms, and running three of them in a row because the page still looks wrong sends a lot of ink to the pad without necessarily fixing anything. Print a nozzle check between cycles and let the pattern decide whether another clean is worth it, which is the procedure in our nozzle check guide. If the same block is missing after two cycles, more cleaning is not the answer.
Borderless printing is the third contributor and the one you actually choose. Printing to the edge means overspraying past the paper, and that overspray lands on a pad. Epson names borderless photographs directly in its description of what fills the pads. Occasional photos are irrelevant. A print run of a hundred borderless six by fours is not.
How to read the counter before it stops you
On a machine with a maintenance box you can watch this number, and almost nobody does. Epson exposes it on the panel and in the driver.
- On the printer panel, Epson's manuals give the path as Maintenance, then Maintenance Box Service Life, which shows the remaining capacity of the box. Other Epson menu layouts carry the same item as Remaining capacity of Maintenance box under Maintenance on the home screen.
- On Windows, open the printer's preferences, go to the Maintenance tab and open EPSON Status Monitor 3. Epson's documentation says the maintenance box status appears on the same screen as the ink cartridge status, so the level you already check for ink is showing you this too.
- On a Canon that takes a maintenance cartridge, the panel prompts you to check the remaining capacity or to replace the cartridge, and Canon's procedure covers both the prompted case and checking it yourself from the menu.
On a machine with fixed pads there is nothing to read, and the first thing you will see is the warning itself. That is why the Canon two stage sequence matters so much on those models. Support code 1700 or 1701 is not a nuisance to click past for the next six months. It is the only notice you get before 5B00 arrives, and the gap between them is your window to decide what you want to do calmly rather than in the middle of printing something you needed.
If you own a tank machine, put a reminder somewhere to check this once or twice a year. The whole argument for a tank printer is that the ink stops being the expensive part, and the waste counter is the one running cost that does not shrink when the ink gets cheap.
Replace, reset or scrap, and what each one actually costs
There are three ways out of this, and the right one is usually obvious once you know which design you own.
The first is to replace the box, which only applies if your model takes one. It is the good outcome and it is cheap. Epson's own store lists the C9344 ink maintenance box at $8.99 and the larger C9345 at $23.99, and Canon lists the MC-G02 maintenance cartridge from $11.99. Set that against the ink itself: across the 24 refillable tank machines in our catalogue, a complete set of bottles has a median list price of $54.96, so the box costs less than a fifth of one set of ink. Buy the genuine part. Epson's manuals recommend a genuine Epson maintenance box and warn that a non-genuine one may not work correctly, and the box carries a chip that the printer reads, so this is not a case where an unbranded equivalent is obviously fine. Do not touch that green chip when you fit it.
The second is to reset the counter, as long as you understand what that does and does not achieve. Service tools that clear a waste ink counter exist for Canon and Epson machines, and they do clear the count. They do not remove one drop of ink from the pad. You have taken away the safety margin the counter existed to enforce, on a pad that is by definition at the end of the capacity the maker allotted to it. If you reset a machine whose pads have never been touched, the realistic outcomes are ink on the desk and ink on the back of your prints. A reset makes sense in one situation: the pads have been physically replaced or cleaned and dried, and the counter now needs to reflect that. On its own it is a way of postponing a mess rather than avoiding one.
The third is to weigh the repair against the machine. If your model has fixed pads, the honest sum is the service cost against what the printer is worth to you. Epson at least publishes an option here, an ink pad replacement service that Epson says includes shipping and packaging round trip, and Epson notes that hardware failures and maintenance messages are typically covered while the printer is under its standard limited warranty or an extended service contract. Check the warranty date before you pay anybody. Epson also makes a point most owners should take seriously: when this message appears, other components may also be near the end of their usable life. A five year old cartridge inkjet with a full pad is often at the end of its economic life, and the money is better spent on a machine you will not be doing this to again. A tank machine is a different calculation. Sets of bottles for the tank machines we list run from $44.00 to $100.00, the machines cost considerably more than a cartridge printer to buy in the first place, and a pad service on one of those is usually worth paying for.
Whatever you decide, do not keep printing through a full absorber on a machine that has actually stopped. Canon's instruction on 5B00 is to have the absorber replaced, and the reason the firmware stopped is that the alternative is ink escaping inside the case.
Which machines carry this, and which never will
Of the 257 printers in our catalogue, 178 put liquid ink through a print head and therefore have somewhere for waste ink to go. The other 79 are laser printers, which fuse dry toner and never purge anything liquid, so no amount of printing will ever produce this message on one. If you are shopping to avoid the problem entirely, that is the answer, and our ink or toner guide covers what else changes when you switch.
| Machine type in our catalogue | How many we list | Does it have an ink pad or box |
|---|---|---|
| Cartridge inkjets | 154 | Yes |
| Refillable tank machines | 24 | Yes, and the counter is unchanged by the cheap ink |
| Laser printers | 79 | No. Nothing liquid is purged, so there is no pad to fill |
| Total | 257 | 178 of them carry the counter |
The tank machines need a note of their own. We list 24 of them, 22 Epson and 2 Canon. Their whole appeal is that refilling costs a few dollars instead of the price of a cartridge set, and that is real. What does not change is the waste system: a tank machine primes its head, runs cleaning cycles and prints borderless exactly like a cartridge machine, so its pad or box fills at a comparable rate while its ink costs a fraction as much. Cheap ink can even make it worse, because there is no longer a cost signal discouraging you from running another cleaning cycle. Our tank versus cartridge guide prices the ink side of that trade. This page is the part of it that the ink price does not cover.
Among cartridge inkjets the split across brands is 67 HP, 43 Canon, 24 Epson and 20 Brother, and the design question stays the same for every one of them: box or fixed pad. Look it up on your model rather than assuming from the badge.
Making the counter last, without babying the printer
Keeping the counter down is mostly a matter of stopping four habits, and none of them costs anything to stop.
- Leave the printer plugged in and let it sleep. Brother documents that a machine which has been powered off runs a cleaning cycle when it comes back on, because it cannot know how long the power was out. Sleep mode uses very little power and skips that purge.
- Print something small every week or two. Regular use keeps ink moving through the nozzles, which prevents the dried head that leads to the cleaning cycles that fill the pad. Brother's own trigger list includes an automatic clean after 45 days of sitting idle. The same logic runs through our clogged printhead guide.
- Stop after two cleaning cycles. Print a nozzle check, compare it with the previous one, and if nothing improved then the problem is not something cleaning will solve. Repeated deep cleans are the fastest way to fill a pad and the least likely to fix a head that has a real fault.
- Use borderless when you actually want a borderless print, rather than leaving it on as a driver default. Every edge to edge page sprays ink past the paper and into the pad.
Do those and the counter behaves the way the makers assumed it would when they sized the pad, which is Brother's stated design intent: enough capacity for the expected life of the machine. The people who hit this message early are almost always the ones whose printer has been cleaning itself far more often than it has been printing.
Common questions
What does ink pad at the end of its service life actually mean?
It means a counter tracking waste ink has reached its limit. Epson describes the pads as porous pads inside the printer that collect, distribute and contain ink not used on printed pages, filled during initial setup, cleaning cycles and borderless printing. Nothing is broken. The printer has stopped on purpose so that a saturated pad does not start leaking inside the case.
Can I just reset the waste ink counter?
You can clear the count on many Canon and Epson machines with a service tool, and the message will go away. The ink is still in the pad. You have removed the margin the counter existed to protect, so the realistic risk is ink leaking onto the desk or onto the back of your prints. A reset is reasonable after the pads have been physically replaced or cleaned and dried. On its own it postpones a mess.
Is this planned obsolescence?
The counter is a real safety limit for a real physical part, and the makers document what it is. The fair criticism is the design choice around it: a printer built with the absorbent material sealed inside the chassis turns a routine consumable into a service job, while a printer built with a maintenance box turns the same event into a $8.99 part you fit yourself. That is the difference worth checking before you buy, not after.
How do I tell whether my printer has a replaceable maintenance box?
Look up your exact model on the manufacturer's supplies or accessories page and see whether a maintenance box or maintenance cartridge is listed for it. On Epson panel models you can also check for Maintenance Box Service Life or Remaining capacity of Maintenance box in the Maintenance menu, since a model with no box does not offer that item.
Does the warranty cover it?
Two different answers, so check which one applies. For a maintenance box Epson's user guides state that the warranty does not cover the cost of replacement and that it is a user serviceable part, which is normal for a consumable. For the fixed ink pad service, Epson says hardware failures and maintenance messages are typically covered while the printer is under its standard limited warranty or an extended service contract, so the purchase date matters.
My Canon says the ink absorber is almost full but it still prints. How long do I have?
Canon does not publish a page count for the gap. Support codes 1700 and 1701 mean almost full, and Canon's instruction is to press OK to continue printing and to contact a service center about a repair. The machine keeps working until the count reaches 5B00, at which point Canon's wording changes to replacing the absorber. Treat the first code as the moment to decide what you are going to do, and cut back on cleaning cycles and borderless printing while you decide.
Does an EcoTank or MegaTank avoid this?
No, and it is the one running cost a tank machine does not escape. The cheap ink changes what a refill costs and changes nothing about priming, cleaning cycles or borderless overspray, so the pad or box fills at a comparable rate. Some tank models take a replaceable maintenance box or maintenance cartridge, which makes the eventual stoppage trivial. Check yours.
Can I use a third-party maintenance box?
Epson recommends a genuine Epson maintenance box and warns that a non genuine one may not work correctly. The box carries a chip the printer reads, which is a different situation from a compatible ink cartridge, and the price gap on a part this cheap is small. Buy the genuine one.
Do laser printers have a waste ink pad?
No. A laser fuses dry toner and purges nothing liquid, so there is no pad and no waste ink counter. All 79 of the laser printers we list are outside this problem entirely. They have their own second consumable instead, which is the drum unit.
Should I repair it or replace the printer?
Price the repair against what the machine is worth to you, and take Epson's warning seriously that when this message appears other components may also be near the end of their usable life. An old cartridge inkjet with fixed pads is usually at the end of its economic life. A tank machine, which cost more to buy and is cheap to feed, is usually worth the service. Either way, recycle the old machine rather than binning it.
Keep reading
- Reset an Epson printer and clear an ink error the panel procedure for E-11, E-12 and the other Epson ink messages.
- Reset a Canon printer after a firmware or ink error the Canon support codes that are not the absorber.
- Ink tank vs cartridge printers the running cost case, and the one line item cheap ink does not touch.
- Faded, streaky or missing colours how to stop cleaning cycles you do not need, which is what fills the pad.
- Preventing a clogged printhead the habit that keeps the printer from cleaning itself on your behalf.
- Recycling empties and old machines where the printer goes if the sum says replace.
Sources
- Epson, Epson Printer Parts Service Required Message, for the statement that the service alert refers to the ink pads, that there are a number of porous pads in the printer that collect, distribute and contain ink that is not used on printed pages, that ink is collected by these pads during the initial setup of the product, during cleaning cycles and when printing borderless photographs, that most users will never receive the message under normal use scenarios, for the three listed options of Epson's ink pad replacement service including shipping and packaging round trip, a local certified technician, or the recycling program, for the statement that hardware failures and maintenance messages are typically covered while the printer is under the standard limited warranty or an extended service contract, and for the note that when this message occurs other printer components may also be near the end of usable life. epson.com
- Epson, Replacing Ink Cartridges and Maintenance Boxes, product documentation, for the statement that the maintenance box stores ink that gets flushed from the system during print head cleaning and that it is replaced when it is at the end of its service life. epson.com
- Epson user guide, Replacing Maintenance Box section, for the statement that the maintenance box life varies with the number of pages printed, the type of material printed and the number of cleaning cycles the product performs, that the need for replacement of the pad does not mean the product has ceased to operate in accordance with its specifications, that the Epson warranty does not cover the cost of this replacement and that it is a user serviceable part, that Epson recommends the use of a genuine Epson maintenance box, and for the instruction not to touch the green chip on the side of the box. manualslib.com
- Epson, Checking Maintenance Box Status on the LCD Screen, for the panel path Maintenance then Maintenance Box Service Life showing the remaining ink capacity of the maintenance box, and Checking Ink and Maintenance Box Status with Windows for the EPSON Status Monitor 3 route via the printer's Maintenance tab. epson.com
- Epson US store, Ink Maintenance Box C9344 and Ink Maintenance Box C9345, for the listed prices of $8.99 and $23.99 and for the description that the box stores ink that gets flushed from the system during print head cleaning. epson.com
- Canon, Inkjet Manuals, support code 5B00, for the statement that the 5B00 support code signifies that the ink absorber is full, that ink used during cleaning and other processes is captured in the ink absorber, that the printer will not be able to print when the ink absorber is full, and that if you intend to print or copy the ink absorber should be replaced by contacting Canon for repair as soon as possible. canon.com
- Canon, Inkjet Manuals, support code 1700, for the cause given as ink absorber is almost full and the instruction to press the printer's OK button to continue printing and to contact your nearest Canon service center to request a repair. canon.com
- Canon USA store, MC-G02 Maintenance Cartridge, for the price as low as $11.99, for the description of it as a replacement for the maintenance cartridge installed in select Canon PIXMA MegaTank printers designed to be easily replaceable by users, and for the listed compatibility with the PIXMA G1220, G2260, G3260, G3262 and G620. canon.com
- Canon Knowledge Base, Support Code 1726 Appears (Maintenance Cartridge is Full) and Replace the Maintenance Cartridge, for Canon publishing a distinct support code and a user replacement procedure on the models that take a maintenance cartridge. canon.com
- Brother Support, How do I clear Machine Error 46, FAQ faq00002611_000, for the statement that Machine Error 46 indicates the ink absorber pad is full and needs replacing, that you will need an engineer to replace it, that out of warranty machines should contact Brother Customer Service, that the ink absorbers hold liquid and dried ink purged from the print head and can control enough ink for the expected life of the machine, and for the list of conditions under which the machine cleans the print head automatically, including the initial purge to fill the ink tubes, a cleaning cycle when the machine is powered back on after being switched off, the first print job after a paper jam is cleared, an improperly capped print head, a cartridge replaced while the machine was powered off, and 45 days powered on with no use. brother.com
- HP, PageWide Managed user guide, Replace the service fluid container, for the statement that when the service fluid container is completely full printing stops until it is replaced and for the part number W1B44A, together with HP's parts store listing for the PageWide service fluid container. hp.com
- Printer counts, machine type splits and the cost of a complete set of ink or bottles come from our own catalogue of printers and the OEM supplies they take, at manufacturer list prices. A complete set is the cheapest cartridge or bottle in each colour slot the model has to fill, with drum units excluded. mycartridgefinder.com
Last updated . This guide is general information, not a repair warranty. Printer menus and HP's model lists change, so confirm the exact steps for your model on the manufacturer's support site before you make changes.