Printing Costs

[Sylv3r]

We have a budget for consumables here at £8,000. Out of this budget I buy CDr's, Floppy Disks, Memory Pens, Toner Cartridges, Ink Cartridges, Drum Units, and the copier paper for the whole school.

There's about £2,000 left which isn't too bad since i generally buy a lot of stock in at the start and still have a lot to use up. If a department has a printer in a room that only they use i.e. not timetabled for any other lesson then they purchase the ink out of their own capitation.

[contink]

Just as a suggestion and this mainly for primary schools but if you rely on inkjet printers you could do a LOT worse than look at continuous ink supply systems and a decent enough printer to handle them.

Ok so I provide these as managed systems to a few schools myself but in all seriousness if you are looking after a few schools you could really save a lot of money if you're prepared to put the time in and learn the ins and outs of such a system.

A good printer to look at is the Epson D88 or similar.. Has a very long lasting printhead, the CIS technology has been out for ages and compatible inks are available at next to nothing compared to standard cartridges.. Oh and you save yourselves from adding a few tons to the landfill..


I'm not about to make the job too easy for you because I invested a lot in this stuff to date, but it is a good way to save some money... and you can even extend the life of your printer if you modify to expel any waste ink to an external tank.. (Epsons in particular need this).


Just as an example though.. when I started out we popped a couple of C84's into my first school a few years back and found that not only did printing increase (people actually found it worked!) but when you considered the cost in broken (clogged, etc) printers and cartridge replacements, etc... they've saved over £3k in less than 2 years since we started keeping track... Oh and the printers are still going strong after 2 service resets (waste ink tank full) and a single maintenance routine (cleaning cartridges, etc..).

Not too shoddy when you consider what the actual cost is for getting yourself trained up..

Of course this doesn't solve the paper budget problem, in fact it probably makes it worse but it still means you aren't chucking money at Canon, HP, and Epson for their champagne...I mean ink..

[ChrisH]

Interesting stuff I have never heard of these systems....

[contink]

Interesting stuff I have never heard of these systems....

I only heard about them originally through ebay of all places and I was just looking for some refill ink for an old Epson 740 a few years back.

I then found a few companies that do them and my engineering genes took over from there, so I build my own kits now and do a lot of testing on new kits and printers.

One word of warning though.. most of the kits on Ebay are cheap knock offs with lousy support and poor build quality so if you are thinking of trying your hand it's worth going with a proven company and inks.

[SpuffMonkey]

Buy yourself a couple of Digital Photography type mags - they usually have a range of continuous ink feed suppliers