Printing - How much do you spend an academic year?

[mattmoo]

Please can you let me know if possible
Size of school (students & staff)
Amount of printers (if poss)
Total cost of consumables this academic year or last year?

We have spent £17, 000 in 10 months
35 printers
700 students & 160 staff

Also how do you manage your printing?

Thanks

Matt

[steveg]

Primary school, 420 pupils, 7 black and white lasers and 1 colour laser. This year i've set the budget at £1500 and when its gone no one will be allowed to print anymore.

Previous years it was around £2500 a year.

Steve

[eean]

Primary school - 700 pupils - 18,000 per year. Some colour lazers but the main problem is the HP deskjets in all the classrooms. I think we'd have a fight if we tried to get rid of them though.

My last place: primary school, 400 pupils - about 2500/year (colour lasers). Swapped over to inkjets with a continuious ink system. (search on here for contink - got it from him). Basically, you have dummy cartridges that are linked with tubes to big ink tanks, that you can then just fill up from a bigger tank. It's not without it's problems - can be messy at times and the ink heads are more prone to blocking. Did reduce our ink bill to about 200/year though!

I thought our bills were high, but by the looks of things we're pretty average.

[laserblazer]

Middle deemed Primary with 540 kids. Our print costs have been reasonably low (£1000 p.a.) because we have Kyocera mono printers that are dirt cheap to run and I have been extremely firm on the use of colour. The teacher would have to come and get me to enable the ICT Suite colour printers and I would try and stay in the room and check what they printed, getting them to print in mono first and then checking it with them for mistakes. After a little while, the kids got very competitive about not allowing me to find mistakes, which is possibly one of the more useful things they have learnt

Now it's all change. We have networked colour photocopiers and each Year has their own budget for printing. This is supposed to save money but I suspect it won't.

[rad]

We spend way too much! we do have about 15 colour lasers

[kmount]

In my last role we typically spent £5k on mono lasers for computer suites which we were responsible for. (12 printers) - We didn't have colour lasers in suites accessible by students.

On top of that given the cost of refilling a colour laser using originals at the time was pushing over £350 (HP 3600's) and we had probably 10 or so of them assuming each department filled up twice was £7k on it's own, add in the admin office printers maybe 3-4 mono toners a year rough figure of £200 per printer and we had maybe 20 of those?

We turned to compats in the end to try and retain control of the spiraling costs which put compats shy of the HP pricing before it went up at the start of the last year.

[john]

Faaaaaar too much, 470 pupils about 50 staff and cost us about £4500 last year on toners alone, I think its faaar too high but I don't seem to be getting much joy of doing anything about it, I think tighten Print Manager Plus up and extract cash from the students and staff from next year mwhahahahah They all have to pay for photocopying so why not printing

[Michael]

I work at numerous establishments, so it's impossible for me to say how much they consume.

In my experience leasing networked photocopiers is the most cost effective way of lowering printing/copying costs and running expenses. Strategically placing them around a site is a good start, and generally most decent photocopiers come complete with monitoring tools or require you to enter a pin number before printing or copying.
I still think the odd laser printer here and there is recommended for backup purposes or administrative users who can/could work more efficiently with a printer close by.

Unfortunately I still see many (what I would call) domestic inkjet printers in schools capable of printing two pages per minute. The cost of ink and electricity (as you're guaranteed they'll be left on over half-term) is just crazy to be honest. I also find HP laserjets (although nice quality) cost an absolute fortune to run too. We're talking about £80 per toner (x4) £320. Domestic inkjet 'all-in-one' cartridges could be as much as £40-£50 at least.

[mattmoo]

Thanks for your replies guys, keep them coming.

We did have a laserjet in each of the phase 1 classrooms (11) and have since removed them in favour of about 4 across the phase with 2 in general areas.

The mono and colour in the LRC has most of the useage but i think we will have to start monitoring if nothing else as the costs are rediculous.

Thanks

Matt

[gaz350]

I reckon we do about 6k a year. 750 approx 40 printers this does not Inc photo copying.

1st year we had colour printouts in art/graphics they blew 3k in 6months!

[rad]

Faaaaaar too much, 470 pupils about 50 staff and cost us about £4500 last year on toners alone,

We have 2000 students 300 staff and spend at least 6 times that. We recently did an order for £5000, normally they are £3000

[Geoff]

We have approx 1650 pupils and 150 staff. We have predominately network laser printers. We also have some network photocopiers on lease. We do have a few colour inkjets sprinked about too (mainly in offices).

We have a budget of approx £5000 for toners + pc repair. We'll likely exceed that allocation.

[Jamo]

Please can you let me know if possible
Size of school (students & staff)
Amount of printers (if poss)
Total cost of consumables this academic year or last year?

We have spent £17, 000 in 10 months
35 printers
700 students & 160 staff

Also how do you manage your printing?

Thanks

Matt

:O Thats a lot!!! We pause all the colour printers each morning a delete the print queues when they build up. Means the teacher has to come and ask for the printers to be unpaused. Seems to cut it down a bit. What kind of printers are they?

[dhicks]

Size of school (students & staff)

800 Pupils, 100 staff.

Amount of printers

Just counted them last Thursday, I have a colour-coded map of the school in front of me now... 19 HP Business Inkjet 1100/1200s, 5 HP Laserjet 4600/4650s, 4 large A3 Canon iR series photocopiers, 1 of which is networked and also does colour, 5 other assorted laser printers, 1 Xerox Phaser solid ink printer, my own HP K8600 with a continuous ink system and a Brother (inkjet) fax machine. So that's 36 in all.

Total cost of consumables this academic year or last year?

I know we budgeted £4,000 for toners for the art department alone... I'm guessing roughly somewhere just under £10,000 a year.

Also how do you manage your printing?

We're thinking about that now. We plan to replace the large photcopiers with new networked copier/printer/scanner machines and I plan to have a system that lets pupils "print" to a PDF document to hand work in instead of printing anything out in the first place. If we're still spending too much we might buy something like Papercut to help manage printing, but I don't rhink we're planning to right at the moment.

--
David Hicks

[monkeyx]

We have approx 1250 learners and 170 staff.

We run at around £1000 per month. Which grieves me.

We are managing to reducce this via use of PDF printers and getting staff migrated to using Moodle so that they feel less need to hand out 25 full colour copies of the 30 page powerpoints!!!!