Printable View
I've now been given the task of looking after the full school printing budget and i would like to know how you guys sort out print monitoring. do you use printer credits or another system to stop the children just printing whatever they want whenever they want?
I really want to start saving money on the printing costs at our school so i was just wondering how everybody else did this?
Many thanks
Kris
Yes we use the print credit system that comes with with CC3. 2 credits mono, 5 credits colour and 10 for A3 printers. Students get reset to 50 every week and staff to 100.
We use Papercut here been using it for about 8 months. Just the fact that the kids, and more importantly the staff, know we are monitoring has made a huge difference.
When they log in they get a pop-up box that tells them how much they have spent that half term, although we dont charge pupils, just staff. If a pupil is using it too much we will have words if they continue we charge them.
Also a little tip for your colour lasers. Reduce the toner density. Done this on all my HP3500 / 3550 and nobody has noticed and toner now last alot longer, although couldn't give you a figure.
thanks forr the quick replies, sysman_mk do you mean by changing the settings in the printer driver to draft or economy etc... i think i'm gonna have to purchase something like print manager i think we could save a bit of money in the long run!
cheers
well if you reduce it from 600 dpi to 300 dpi that's 50% less toner. :)
We use Papercut aswell and it's been great for the past couple of years.
The only problem we're starting to come up with is;
Art want to collect money from students when they print. But because Papercut just takes credit out no matter where they print this isn't possible as far as I can see. So the Art teacher just has to go through and check every week.
I use Print Manager Plus which allows 5 print outs a week max per pupil, which reduces the waste somewhat but I am noticing that there is always a huge stack of uncollected work at the end of a week (thinking about it, the max number of prints allowed for a week for the pupils comes to 3000 prints and we are printing a total of 600 per week, of which I reckon 40% are not collected). I am introducing some more draconian rules to tackle this - such as banning untitled documents, chasing people if I spot something come out which is stupid and I am looking at how to put the user's name on the top of the page.
We use Print Manager Plus, we did use PCounter but found that PMP was much much better.
We use the following.
All print jobs over 5 pages are deleted by the system, they have to break the job up.
Year 7 & 8 - 4 pages per day
Year 9 - 8 pages per day
Year 10 - 16 Pages per day
Year 11 - 32 Pages per day
Staff Unlimited
Woks well for us and have decreased our toner cost dramatically
We just worked out our budget works out at about 30 pages, per person, per year lol.
In the printer settings you can adjust the individual toner density setting from +5 to -5 with 0 as default. Set mine to -5. Pages do look fainter, but for day to day use nobody noticies.Quote:
Originally Posted by krisd32
@krisd32: You should come and see me over Easter...
I currently use Print Manager Pluse (v6) but am not 100% happy with it and don't want to keep paying the maintenance fee to keep getting upgrades.
Over Easter I will be moving all my queues over to a Linux print server running CUPS and PyKota which should give more flexibility and has the advantage of being open source and free (barring the £25 donation I gave for the priviledge of the debs and to support the cause!).
I think you might also benefit from hearing about my way of charging for printouts - we are probably unique in the way that we do this! All kids are given £2 of credit at the start of the year and are charged the cost of the printout (approx 1p/page in mono and 10p/page in colour depending on the printer). If the kid goes over this amount (200 pages of printing is quite a bit mind), they have to top up with actual cash!
As of next week (start of the new financial year) all departments are to be given some credit from my budget depending upon the size of their department. They will then be charged once a term for what has been printed (I will initially email some statements to HODs so they can keep track better). Our head is on a bit of a money saving kick and wants departments to be more accountable - he feels (and I agree) that this method will benefit those who are already careful with printing and punish those who print instead of photocopy... eventually teaching them to make savings.
Like I said, you're not far away so come and visit :D
To those who actually charge their students real money.
How do your parents react?
When our school's budget was cut by over £200,000 one year while all of the other schools in the LEA were getting more (we're foundation), our head asked the parents for a voluntary donation of £5 pa and the crap hit the fan right away. We had the TV, radio and newspapers at the school gates the following day and they gave the school a right slagging of for asking for the money. If we start charging them for there work I'll have to go to work in a chainmail suit!
A lot of schools ask for donations but our parents got really upset about it.
I'd love to charge our students for all the wasted crud they print but I fear that I'd be on the phone to irate parents all day long. We spent nearly £7,000 on toner and ink last year and it needs to be reduced. Mind you the bill went up as soon as they started charging faculties the true cost of photocopying 'cos they all started to send their 1,000 page documents to the lasers instead.
HBJB
It has always been the case... that's how I get away with it.
I guess that the £2 of credit helps matters too... most kids will never use this and it's not as if it is an arbitrary charge. I spent ages working out those costs!
... and for a different slant.
One of the big things to cut costs has to be to look at the actual cost of ownership by taking into account all the actual consumables, parts costs, etc.. that actually exist in the real world and go for a balance of reliability, low consumable cost, etc...
There's no point in having a colour printer in every room when a B&W laser will do and any colour work needn't all be a colour laser..
If you use inkjets make sure they get used regularly and keep them away from radiators.. All helps reduce clogging and associated maintenance costs.
I know I bang out about CIS's but the HP K550 along with the upcoming K5400, L7000 series are already pretty cost effective so getting a CIS to essentially expand the printers ink capacity by 9 times reduces your costs to ink only, no cartridge landfill, reduced maintenance, etc... Of course you have to offset that against the likelihood of damage, etc.. caused by the kids...
For two schools I have CIS enabled printers in, the problems of printing went from "consumables are killing us".. to "our paper budget is higher".. Thing is that the paper budget increase never came close to outweighing the consumables savings so for a primary school it's worked well.