If you currently own a home printer or if you’re thinking about purchasing one, you may be wondering how you can effectively manage the cost of running it. In this guide, we’re going to be giving you some tips on how to make your home printer running costs more affordable.
Reduce Waste
The biggest costs associated with the running of a printer is the paper and toner, so one of the best ways to manage printing costs is to make better use of your resources. Not only does this make the running of your printer more affordable, it also helps to reduce the impact on the environment by reducing the energy and raw materials required to produce paper and ink.
Save the Trees with Multi-Page Printing
If you can fit more than one page of text/images onto a single sheet of paper, make sure to use multi-page printing to do so to help reduce the amount of paper you use. Similarly, printing on both sides of the sheet using duplex (double-sided) printing can cut your paper costs in half.
Keep it Short and Sweet
If you’re printing pages from a large document that has multiple pages, only print the information you need by using the custom page settings. Alternatively, if you only need small bits of information across the whole document, copy and paste each small section onto a word document and adjust the content so that it fits onto as few pages as possible and uses less ink.
If you need to print a document that has coloured images on it, but you don’t necessarily need images to be in colour, make sure to select the ‘Black and White’ option before hitting print. This is because coloured ink is much more expensive than black ink.
Only Print in Colour When Necessary
Did you know that colour printer cartridges can cost up to 40% more than just black cartridges? Not only that, but colour printing also takes longer and consumes more energy to complete. That’s why, unless absolutely necessary, you should select the Black & White option when printing documents that have coloured text or images on.
Scan Instead of Copy
If you need to send someone a document, instead of copying it and giving them the physical printout, use the scan and email option to send them a digital copy instead as this helps to save on paper, ink and energy.
Print Using Draft Quality
If the quality of your document isn’t too important, before printing, make sure to change the quality settings to 'draft quality’. This uses less ink and energy and also speeds up the printing process.
Use Ink-Friendly Fonts
This may come as a surprise, but different fonts use different amounts of ink. According to research, fonts including Times New Roman, Century Gothic and Ecofont are some of the most economical fonts that use less ink, whilst fonts such as Arial actually use more. According to CNET.com, you could be saving up to 31% in printing costs by using Century Gothic instead of Arial.
Preview Before Printing
Large amounts of waste when printing comes from people making mistakes on documents and only realising after printing. This is why it’s important to take a few seconds to review your document for errors and double check the formatting in Print Preview so you can be sure you’re getting it right the first time.
Don’t Spam the Printer Queue
If your document hasn't been printed the first time, don’t keep pressing print as this may result in multiple copies suddenly being printed at once, wasting lots of ink, paper and energy. Go into your computer’s printer settings and check the queue for the status before retrying as it may just be taking a while to load to the document. Alternatively, see if you can resolve the printer error by looking at the codes before retrying. Check out our handy guide to diagnosing your HP printer error codes to help resolve the issue.
For more helpful tips and advice on managing your printer costs, why not check out our other handy guides. Are you a business? Find out how a managed print service (MPS) could help your business save significant amounts of time and money.
