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Comment by pifm_guy | Hacker News Reader

Most are refillable if you follow an unofficial online guide.

Beware that toner dust is really nasty stuff and gets everywhere, so however careful you are you'll still have clouds of toner dust escape and stick to every surface of your house inside and out...

Top tip:. Never clean toner dust with warm water. It will stick and become permanent.

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In any situation where you can see toner you want to be wearing an N95 mask. Inhale any of it and it is in your lungs forever.

The best thing for cleanup is a 3M electronics vacuum which has a filter that will trap that stuff securely.

This makes these refill kits sound really dangerous.

There isn't yet enough research on health hazards of toner to really give a good answer here... Black toner for example is mostly polyester plastic and carbon dust. Neither of those are particularly toxic, although they are in a much finer powder than you'd normally encounter them.

Basically I'd still steer clear of them, but exposing yourself to them isn't a certain death sentence like say organic mercury.

I would say akin to smoking a cigarette. One time won't hurt you in a measurable way but if your job is refilling toners or dealing with broken laser printers you need some protection.

Be warned that mixing different formulations of toner could cause the toner to not stick tot he drum properly and start to pool up in your printer requiring expensive maintenance.

Typically one can fix that by adjusting the transfer drum voltage, normally found in the service section of the menu.

You might also need to adjust the fuser temperature for non-oem toners

Lets put aside the fact that you wouldn't know the correct values for whatever garbage generic toner the refill company gave you. How are you going to deal with the fact that the printer already has particles of the old toner in the system and now you are introducing contamination with a set of different particles from the new cartridge/refill?

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