Thanks Sam! I think I saw another pic of that nozzle cap just recently, may have been a different supplier but same design, with a divider down the middle to separate the 2 sides, and a half-hole on one side only. (Mine is just one open area with a single hole, no divider.)
Yes the ink level in the funnel tube can drop fast once it's below the bottom of the cone, and it takes a while for the suction to equalize so it stops! I had a mini-panic from a couple that got very low like that too! It's even worse with my "dual-sided" nozzle cap, because one side may be nearly empty before the other side has moved much, so it needs to be topped up again to avoid sucking air. So the single-sided nozzle cap you have definitely helps save ink.
I think I was pulling 7-10 mL too for each colour, and sometimes more if I had to top one up a second time to deal with the above. My printheads weighed 45-50 g or so, so roughly speaking were missing 10-15 mL of ink total. So up to about 8 mL or so for a single colour if it's empty, but then need extra in the funnel to prevent sucking air, plus of course some ink is lost while drawing the air from the head. So sometimes 10 mL (or more).
The single-side nozzle cap wins here too because you can do a little at a time with a single colour without needing to clean the ink syringe. With my dual-sided setup and only 1 syringe, I had to keep cleaning the syringe between colours, so it was easier to just pull 8 mL or so and accept that I might be wasting some ink. I've since bought a second syringe to make it easier to do both colours at once, so now I can do a full head before needing to clean the syringes.
Yes I might try LPS for the single-sided cap. Their pricing tho sometimes make it better value to just buy their kit anyway, and the shipping to Canada is pricey. I try to wait until I need a few things at once (or I look for similar elsewhere). (I don't have a business so these are real costs to me haha.)
I think the cleaning solution is still the most curious part for me. In my case I think I would choose to skip it unless I had a really clogged head. It just seems like I'd burn so much ink to flush out the fluid before getting consistent colour and print quality. But I guess it depends on how effectively the purge/prime removes it... If the fluid is mainly replacing the air in the head, and then the fluid is removed while pulling in ink and they don't mix much, then maybe it actually results in *less* ink wasted, because it's mainly fluid not ink being removed when purging the air? 🤔 Which would actually be pretty smart if it works that way. Could you actually see a colour change that showed that the last of the cleaning fluid was coming out of the nozzles and good ink was appearing?
