Yes this has been asked many times before i guess, just need some figures on the cost of printing within a 3 form entry primary school , need to half our printing costs, need figures to show the Head.Also ways of reducing the costs would be appreciated.
Ours was just under £3000 last year thats with 250 users. However all schools differ in my experence.
this is difficult to answer as each school will be different i use papercut print logger to get the data then i used to do a pivot table to show meaning ful data but synack created a asp web page to show the data see link
Papercut Print Logger Free edition - Log Distiller ASP page
hope it helps
Reduce the number of printers! If people have to walk they wont print so much!
Encourage use of a VLE and handing in work online
Can you give an indication of what you're using in terms of hardware at the moment... ?Originally Posted by Hamzah
Yes this has been asked many times before i guess, just need some figures on the cost of printing within a 3 form entry primary school , need to half our printing costs, need figures to show the Head.Also ways of reducing the costs would be appreciated.
i wish it was that easy! we are talking about teachers! they get the kiddos to do the running around.
haha true! Trying to get teachers to use a VLE is hard too, we have fronter here at the moment and to be honest it is a horrendous ugly platform but noone has used it yet. (Well one person did and came back and said the kids hated it and were using stickys to talk to eachother!)
Try installing a PDF printer? Get people to give out PDF worksheets in a shared area?
Colour laser jets 2 which are oki and 2 are HP
Mono 9 hp's laserjet and 1 oki
A handfull of inkjets 5 or so
3 all in one units, scanner fax printer.
3 photocopiers.
problem is the staff! not the students.
Good grief... No wonder your budget it all over the place...
Wouldn't mind betting the inkjets are clogged silly and barely work either.
If teachers are the problm then you need to create a budget report on how the printers are being used at present and how they could be... I can help with that if you can give me an idea of how many staff and children you have in school...
714 kids and around 100 staff. any help will do thanks.
as for the inkjets they are used quite often.
If you are lucky. If you are unlucky they'll print the same thing several times, because it "didn't work" the first time.
* install print credit software - papercut, pcounter and stopit are common names for this. There is a learning curve with this, but it should happen quite quickly. When we first introduced it, we gave 150 credits (pages) per half term and everyone ran out; now students get just 60 per half term and very rarely need more.
* educate the users on more efficient printing, i.e. proof read first, re-print only those pages necessary, etc
* consider more cost-effective printers - cheaper printers (generally) have higher running costs. We're about to replace some of our laser printers with Xerox Phaser 8560 solid ink printers, which will save us over £1000 per year! Speak to LNL Printers and Consumables about their free printers for schools.
As NickJones says. We introduced Print Manager Plus and bolted it down hard as our print costs spiralled out of control. I say 'we' but I implemented it with the full support of the SMT.
You must have SMT backing and they must not waiver (ask witch!) as it is probably the most unpopular thing you will do in your school career. Although installing Smoothie, probably comes close! The dust settled here after about 2 terms and our toner bills have halved.
One important point... if you have local printers, you cannot manage their output from a central Print Manager Plus. You need to restrict people to printing on network printers.
How we use PMP to control costs is in this thread: Print Manager software
Last edited by elsiegee40; 26th March 2009 at 01:47 PM.
Through the use of some print manager software you could reroute jobs to the photocopiers once sent to the standard printers for any job > 50 copies etc.
Have you thought about Print quotas?
Is it the students are the staff that are abusing facilities? - it may just be a case of re educating them again.
We have a £3k budget for 800 kids and 100 staff, last year though we only spent half that.
Since I've worked there, I refill toner cartridges instead of replacing and results are indistinguisable from the original toners. Several Dell 5100cn color laser, several brother 5250dn mono laser, 3 Dell M5200 mono laser, an epson colour laser and the odd inkjet in SMT offices that does about 3 pages a month, so barely relevant.
Website I use is Toner refills. Do-it-yourself toner Refills. U Refill Toner based in birmingham but there are plenty of other companies offering it. My advice is to avoid anyone selling "one size fits all" toner as it certainly does not. When I first started trying it out I got desperate and put dell toner in an epson laser, it worked for a week then clogged the cartridge solid. It really has to be right and in my experience, theirs has been.
Works for me, Your Milage May Vary.
Cheers
Alex
Last edited by AHeighton; 3rd September 2009 at 08:57 PM.
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