Brother HL-5250DN Low Toner Override
This week has been a bad productivity wise. First the Mac Pro issues, then the my trusty mono laser printer abruptly died. It seems like the universe is conspiring to keep me from developing retail software.
My Brother HL-5250DN printer stopped working this week-- grinding to a halt half way through my 2007 tax return. The status light glowed an angry red color, and the toner light glowed yellow.
After some initial troubleshooting, I turned to Google to have my suspicions confirmed -- the printer shut down preemptively because the toner cartridge was getting low. Note that I said "low" and not "empty."
The toner cartridge has a small round window on each side of the toner cartridge. Normally, toner in the cartridge will block light from passing through the cartridge. However, if the toner gets below a certain level, the light will pass through and strike a sensor on the other side alerting the printer to shut down.
This would be analogous to Ford making their cars shut down when the gas tank only had 1/4 tank of gas left, forcing you to purchase a new gas tank with full fuel.
The work around is to block the light from reaching the sensor, by simply covering up one of the windows. I took a self-adhesive address label and covered one of the little windows. Problem solved.
You can expect to get another 1000+ pages out of the "hacked" printer cartridges before they start to gray or streak.
