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

 

 

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

[Guest 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!!!!

[bossman]

Secondary school:

Pupils: 720

Staff:approx 70

Printers: 42 mono and colour

Costs: last year 6.5K

This covers only ICT suites as the departments pay for their own toner cartridges.

I would estimate another 2k for this.

 

We do run a printer credits system here except the staff I am told by my line manager are to have unlimited, I do what I am told and when the toner runs out and we have no more budget they then have to go cap in hand to the finance officer. I have made countless suggestions to save money at least 25% but they have always rejected my proposals.

[K.C.Leblanc]

From the Desk of Vegas

 

63 Printers, mostly HP colour lasers.

Bit over £20k spent

About 1200 on roll with 100 staff

 

At the moment we don't do printer credits, the only monitoring we do is using paper cut to spot people who blatently take the mickey.

[CyberNerd]

@those with quotas

 

what do you set for ks3/ks4/ks5 per term?

[steele_uk]

We have 1100 Students, 130 staff.

 

43 printers, We budget £8000 for Toners & spares/repairs per year.

 

The photocopy-ing is a seperate budget not managed by us.

[Ex-MGSTech]

Secondary Grammar School

1300 on roll (mostly boys)

200 Staff (inc admin)

 

Curriculum Mono Printers 5 (all Laserjets)

Curriculum Colour Printers 8 (6 laser & 2 Inkjet)

 

Admin Mono Printers 4 networked Copiers,12 Personal lasers, 10 Personal inkjets

Admin Colour 2 Colour Lasers

 

Toner & Ink last year £14,000

 

Curriculum printing controls: Print Manager plus

Admin Printing Controls:none

 

Curriculum Print quotas

 

Staff £10 per month

Students £5 per month

 

We hemorage money through our printers!, I worked out were were responsible for the destruction of 1 trees per week in paper last year!

[AlexB]

Secondary (KS3/KS4)

550 kids

5 Colours

15 Monos (roughly)

couple of hardly used legacy inkjets

 

£3600 last year, excluding money recovered charging for colour prints beyond allowance (very little recovered)

 

Admin staff completely unlimited and unmonitored.

 

Curric staff restricted to 50 colour pages a month by default, but no questions asked for more. Mono only limited by page count per job to prevent accidental waste.

 

Pupils restricted to 10 mono pages a day (no cost for more, just need a good reason) Cuts massively on wasted paper. Pupils pay for colour pages beyond very small yearly allocation, charges low, but restricts wasteful printing.

 

Almost all of our restrictions are about reducing waste.

Edited June 9, 2009 by AlexB

[pooley]

Primary School, 400 Kids, 3Colour Laser printers (HP 3550's)

 

Spent £4500 last academic year.

 

Have just purchased a colour photocopier to replace our lasers.

Rental = £1200 a year

Price per Colour print (A4) = 4.5p (remains the same if entire page is made up of block colour or just part)

Price per Black (A4) = 0.003 per copy.

"Per copy" costs should work out about £1300 a year, based on our current usage.

It will save up approx half what we spend now.

[bulletproofbaba]

We use a print manager software that enables us to give students printer credits and so allowing them to print only a certain amount of documents and therefore reducing the amount of paper usage, the software is designed by a company called software shelf, and it very good, very easy to install and setting up as well. There are so many tweaks in the software that will enable you to get a better control, things like restricting internet printing, number of pages, files with certain extensions, printer credit renewals, printer history reports, top ten users etc etc. Worth checking out as although I am not sure what the financial implication has been, but we have noticed considerable difference in paper use.

[bulletproofbaba]

Sorry people, forgot to add the link

 

Print Manager Plus 2008 Standard Academic Edition Product Home Page

 

Worth reading. PCounter is another software option as well. - tried and tested

[JJonas]

I asked the same question a while back.

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/budgets-expenditure/26014-how-big-your-printing-budget.html