Printers. How many and where do you have them?

[DCUK6]

Hi,

 

We are spending a fortune on printer and toners. Its partly down to the previous tech buying rubbish Dells that are only supposed to be printing 20 pages a week and jam when doing that.

 

We have printers in every class which means we regularly have to replace at least one printer every month or two.

 

 

I'm thinking of ways to reduce the number of printers and reduce costs whilst keeping printer accessible.

 

 

Where do you keep your printers?

Do you have them in each teaching room?

 

Cheers.

[synaesthesia]

We have a printer (decent colour lasers) in every ICT suite, our faculty support/admin staff have printers, one in each staffroom and that's it.

[fiza]

We have mono printers in each IT room. We have a colour one in the LRC. We have mono MFDs in the staffroom, Office and Finance. Repro have 2 Colour MFDs for bulk printing. Most Departmental offices have their own mono printers.

[steveg]

We have 6 colour mfd's and 2 colour copiers in the whole school, all on contract, just pay lease and cost per page. Toners are ordered automatically, any problems are solved same or next day, never been happier with printing!

 

We're a primary school, 17 classes.

 

Steve

[6Foot2]

We have about 50 print queues mostly mono lasers.

 

We have recently deployed some pull/follow me print queues. The hope is that these will be more popular with staff and students and as printers fail around the school we will be able to deploy more pull queues, thus cutting down on the number of print queues overall and cutting down on unwanted printing. Time will tell...

[Edu-IT]

We have 19 colour laser printers in department offices, 4 MFP's around the building and 1 large photocopier which we try to put the bulk of the copying through. All are on a managed print contract with just a lease cost and cost per page. Everything is automated so toner arrives without intervention etc.

[DCUK6]

Seems like you have what im looking to do.

 

Printer in each office and ICT suite and a few MFDs. The problem is im trying to find somewhere to put the MFDs where people don't have to walk miles as that wouldn't go down well

.

[witch]

One in each year group - soon to be a managed black and white laser

One in DH and HT office, two in admin office

One networked photocopier for whole school

[has]

in total we have 4 large mfd's. Over 35 network printers (mostly mono) and over 80 local usb printers (mostly mono). tried convincing smt to move to managed printing/papercut etc but no ones listening. i've given up.

[localzuk]

2 MFDs in reprographics (these 2 handle the vast majority of printing) - 1 colour, 1 mono.

 

3 mono printers in our 3 ICT suites

2 mono printers in our admin office

2 colour mini-MFDs in our other 2 admin offices

1 colour printer in our SEN office

4 colour printers in our head/deputy head/assistant heads offices

1 mini mono copier in our DT room

1 inkket MFD in our DT room

1 A3 colour printer in our art room

1 mono printer in our kitchen

1 colour inkjet in our maths dept

1 mini colour MFD in our library

1 mini colour MFD as our fax machine (legacy, soon to be retired)

 

All are lasers except where mentioned.

[LeMarchand]

School 1:

Leased colour MFDs in upper school and lower school areas and another in office, users must put in code to retrieve printing, default = mono

Huge colour laserjet in office (left over from the pre-MFD days and kept because LEA will only allow financial software to print to certain machines)

 

School 2:

Leased colour MFD in middle of school, soon to be coded, defaults to mono

Colour laser in office + ancient financial software mono laser

 

School 3:

Leased colour MFDs in office and central corridor, need to use key card to print, default = mono

Old mono laser for financial software

 

I'd say you don't need a device/room, but you do need at least 2 devices in case one goes down. All the above only have around 200 pupils, and even those with only a single "teacher use" machine are physically small sites - so not far to walk.

[clockend25]

Reprographics - 2 High Volume Copiers

Admin Offices/Faculty Areas - 7 smaller copiers/1 Colour MFD/2 Mono Laser printers

ICT Suites - Five Colour MFDs

 

All the above on a print contract.

 

Then the barrel-load of local printers, mainly in offices, although one faculty went down the route of putting a colour inkjet in every classroom last summer. We're in the process of trying to scale this back, starting with laughing off some of the new requests for local printers.

[rad]

I'll trump the lot of you.... 74 networked + 70 odd standalone.

 

Yes we do need to sort something out!

[Bento]

We have a Ricoh MFD system with PaperCut here, school size 620 Pupils and about 80 Staff with about 30 classrooms including specialities such as Art and Food.

 

The school is a bit of an odd layout but we've got:

 

1 Small MFD in each IT Room (2 total)

1 Large MFD in the Reprographics area (with finishers)

1 Large MFD in the Art and Design Technology Block

1 Small MFD in the Staff room

1 Small MFD in the main school office which also serves the surrounding offices for the HT etc. This Device also faxes.

 

All our devices default to Mono and Duplex.

 

Going with this system is one of the best decisions for the school IMO. We scrapped inkjet printers on every desk and the amount of time I spend on Printing issues has drastically reduced. Automatic toner ordering is a godsend too. Worth every penny.

Edited November 4, 2014 by Bento

[Chris_]

I'll trump the lot of you.... 74 networked + 70 odd standalone.

 

Yes we do need to sort something out!

 

I thought we were bad with around 60 networked printers and 50 local USB printers. We only have around 600 pupils from nursery-sixth form!!

[pow]

2xMFDs 5xPrinters THATS IT - 840 pupils

[jtotheb]

I'll trump the lot of you.... 74 networked + 70 odd standalone.

 

Yes we do need to sort something out!

 

I'd rather not be the "winner" but I'll go in at 151 physical print devices, 89 deployed print queues (from the 151), and a partridge in a pear tree.

 

(The above doesn't even include the specialist printers e.g. label printers, sublimation, laser cutters and all that jazz)

 

Our toner supplier must make their yearly bonus on our account alone.

Edited November 7, 2014 by jtotheb

[Sagima]

We used to have a, cheap-to-buy-expensive-to-run printer for roughly every two members of staff and we cut that back to having departmental and ict suite printers which in theory was supposed to save us money but because we replaced them with decent cheap to run mfps we've actually ended up doubling the amount we print as the staff love them and thus have saved basically nothing and may actually be spending more as the staff print everything out now. The head is against quotas for anyone.

We now have a printer for every 7 members of staff

[DJ3Dog]

I worked with the purchasing department and replaced ALL owned devices with leased equipment and consolidated everywhere possible. Our avarage cost per click on for example an HP LJ 4200 was someting like $.00.10 after figuring in servicing.

 

After the consolidation and signing service contracts its more like $00.03 after figuring in annual lease costs. This also has consumables and servicing all inclusive.

 

Replaved a 700ish printer fleet in just under 3 months

 

Our B&W click costs on MFP devices is 00.0055

Edited February 3, 2015 by DJ3Dog