Printers and Credits!!! What do you do???

[gibbo_ap]

Greetings all after having to place a second order this fiscal for more toner we are re-evaluating our policies on printing in the school.

 

this year our big order was just under £10k for toner and ink! crazy i know! and we have had to order more!

 

we have about 70 printers in the school (30 col 40 mono) yep alot!

 

we have a 'credit system' which is not enforced, students just get more.

 

i want to know what the rest of you do i have read http://www.edugeek.net/forums/how-do-you-do/10585-printing-credits-limits.html this thread but we cant really charge (tho i will be listing this in my proposal.)

 

so any ideas please help

 

ways of monitoring printer use?? etc

[contink]

If you can't charge then I'd seriously consider Continuous ink supply (CIS) systems as one way to reduce your costs for SOME (not all) printing needs.

 

If you can give an idea of what printers you already have available I can give you a realistic idea of whether you can do some initial testing and/or places/suppliers to try.

[sahmeepee]

...and the bad news is - your cost per page has almost certainly gone up in the last month or two. HP toners are up massively in the last month (approx 10%) and the toners for their new printers are ridiculously expensive: their low end mono printers like the P1005 and P1006 cost around 2.33 pence per sheet! That is up from about 1.7 p/sheet we were paying on the old LJ1018s a year ago. Toners for those (12a) are now approaching 2 p/sheet.

 

We have a daily print limit for kids which they can extend just by asking (but i suspect it cuts down on frivolous waste)

We restrict classroom printers so they can't print web pages and emails directly (must copy the text they want to word etc)

We restrict classroom printers to a maximum number of copies (to help teachers get over their photocopier phobias)

We restrict classroom printers to a maximum number of pages/job (because that 168 page PDF from AQA can probably go to reprographics too)

 

I sometimes charge departments for their toner rather than billing it centrally if the printing logs suggest they have been using the printer as a photocopier. I suspect replacing any ink printers you have with toner ones will save you money in the long run although I've not run the numbers on it in a long time.

 

We use Pcounter for our print control, but there are quite a few similar products out there.

[elsiegee40]

Rather than type it all out again...

 

This thread http://www.edugeek.net/forums/general-chat/26793-print-manager-software.html

 

has what we do with Print Manager Plus in it.

 

We achieved a drastic reduction in print toner bills and do not charge any real money for printing.

[mac_shinobi]

Software for print quota and print control management. Your print accounting and monitoring solution - PaperCut

[gibbo_ap]

lots of hp 3600s, 2100, 2200, 2015, etc with some konica 2450 & 2350s

 

we are just writing the proposal up at the time and getting phone calls syaing where is the toner! lol

[FN-GM]

We use Pcounter, does the job very well

[mac_shinobi]

We use Pcounter, does the job very well

 

Had PCounter when at the kingswood school and it was a nightmare - might of just been the version that we had - not sure but have had a go with papercut as per the post above that I made and that from what I gathered is very good.