5 Money-Saving Tips to Reduce Printer Costs
We’ve all been there. The inevitable “low ink” status in the midst of a 10-page report. “Didn’t we just replace the ink cartridges last week?” you think to yourself. We want to avoid it but we can’t. Luckily, we have a few tips and suggestions that can help ease the financial stress of replacing ink cartridges.
1. Double-Check Your Work
Even as professionals and adults, we need to be reminded of this elementary rule. Not only because we want to ensure that our work has no errors, but also to save printer ink and paper. With less reprints and more double (and sometimes triple) checking our work, we can ensure that we are saving both time and money.
2. Change Up the Font
By eliminating funky text styles and reducing the bold and italics to a minimal, it will help lower the amount of ink that is used.
Ecofont is an eco-friendly font software that uses petite dots when printing text. It saves close to 50% of your original printer ink. The software is available for Outlook and Word and downloading is a breeze. Available for both Mac and Windows OS.
3. Print in Black-and-White
There have been plenty of times where you wanted to print off a webpage and ended up using unnecessary amounts of your color ink cartridge. By simply adjusting your default settings to print only in black and white, also known as grayscale, it will help conserve your color ink for when you need it the most.
4. Select “Printer-Friendly” When Printing Directly from Web
Printing directly from webpages can result in an unnecessary amount of wasted ink, not to mention unnecessary amounts of printer paper. When you choose to print from the webpage, everything from that specific page including unwanted images, text, and ads will be included.
Most webpages include an option for when you want to print, called “Printer-Friendly” option. This option will eliminate all unwanted images and texts and gives you what is most important.
If that option is unavailable, there is a free tool that you can use called Print What You Like. This tool is free to use and it provides a printer-friendly version of any webpage. Also available as a Chrome extension.
5. Turn Your Printer’s ‘On/Off Switch’ to OFF
Unlike computers and other electronic devices where we always make sure to turn off when we’re finished, printers are one of the few devices that we just leave on to hibernate. One unknowing tidbit is to ensure your printer’s on/off switch is turned to off. This will park and cap your ink cartridges thus saving you from prematurely dried-out cartridges.
If you have any other suggestions or tips on how to make most of your printer ink, we’d love for you to share them below!