Printing Costs

[eejit]

We spent £8000 on printing last year which I thought was a lot, but a friend of mine works in a secondary school in London with 1,600 pupils who spent £50,000 (admin and curriculum combined)

 

That's £31 a pupil.

 

Are they out of control? What are you guys spending?

[Nij.UK]

how many printers do you have in school, we have about 15 printers in school, and my printing comes in at about £2500 for the year... that is admin and curr.........

 

I have to charge pupils for printing using a credit system, and also charge departments for printing aswell.

[plexer]

We budgeted £6K which we thought would be adequate and I've allready spent 75% of that budget.

 

Ben

[eejit]

He has about 15 curriculum network printers and lots of local printers for the admin staff - he has no print quota software, which is obviously allowing people to do what they want. I recommended Print Manager Plus to him as we use it (but I'm not 100% happy with it myself), I'm not sure that it can monitor local printers as well as network printers though.

[mrforgetful]

We use Papercut Print Credits, I like it a lot more than Print Manager Plus/

[Geoff]

There's a free print logger from paper cut you can install to. If you need some hard evidence to back up your point of view.

 

http://papercut.biz/products/free_software/print_logger/

[eejit]

That looks good alright. Another Google search I did came up with PrintAudit which looks good - needs a client installed on every machine so that it can catch local print jobs. Does Papercut use a client on each PC?

[Geoff]

Can do if you want to. There's only two reasons to do it though:

 

1) You want to monitor local printers.

2) Users want to know how much quota they have left.

[Ric_]

There is also a module for PMP for doing local printers.

 

Of course it's more cost effective to ditch the local printers and replace with second user HP LaserJets than you can manage centrally.

[Midget]

luckily each department looks after their own paper/ink/toner, however I now have to supply the new unsupervised 6th form IT room and staff IT room with a printer that I have to pay for.

 

May have to bring in some printer credits software, and looking at a way to make the user go to the printer and acknowledge a job to print on a terminal next to the printer, in order to stop them printing willy nilly. We had this system in my Uni, so it is possible.

[Ric_]

@Midget: PrintManagerPlus will do that for you.

[Midget]

*rubs chin*

 

*goes to look on their website*

 

looks interesting. Ta Luv.

[ChrisH]

There's a free print logger from paper cut you can install to. If you need some hard evidence to back up your point of view.

 

http://papercut.biz/products/free_software/print_logger/

 

Thats a good little app could easily pull the CSV in to a db as well to do queries on .

[bossman]

We have 30 networked laserjets and so far i have spent including paper £3900 as i impose printing credits as follows:

years 7, 8, 9 = 50 credits pw

years 10, 11 = 100 credits pw

Staff = 200 credits pw

printer owners = unlimited on their printer

Admin staff = unlimited on their printer

Depending on where you are printing from the charge for each page varies accordingly i.e. A3 printing colour costs 10 credits per page in the art room but only 5 credits for A4 from the colour printer in the ict suite and a mono print A4 costs 2 credits per page.

It seems to work very well indeed as the staff and pupils have come to understand that they need to manage their printing effectively.

[eejit]

Bossman, what is your response when you have a pupil who comes to you on Wednesday having used up all their credits and "I have to hand this assignment in today" or similar tale of woe? That is where most systems fall down. Do you refuse them, charge them, or extend their credit?

[Sylv3r]

We have a budget for consumables here at £8,000. Out of this budget I buy CDr's, Floppy Disks, Memory Pens, Toner Cartridges, Ink Cartridges, Drum Units, and the copier paper for the whole school.

 

There's about £2,000 left which isn't too bad since i generally buy a lot of stock in at the start and still have a lot to use up. If a department has a printer in a room that only they use i.e. not timetabled for any other lesson then they purchase the ink out of their own capitation.

[contink]

Just as a suggestion and this mainly for primary schools but if you rely on inkjet printers you could do a LOT worse than look at continuous ink supply systems and a decent enough printer to handle them.

 

Ok so I provide these as managed systems to a few schools myself but in all seriousness if you are looking after a few schools you could really save a lot of money if you're prepared to put the time in and learn the ins and outs of such a system.

 

A good printer to look at is the Epson D88 or similar.. Has a very long lasting printhead, the CIS technology has been out for ages and compatible inks are available at next to nothing compared to standard cartridges.. Oh and you save yourselves from adding a few tons to the landfill..

 

 

I'm not about to make the job too easy for you because I invested a lot in this stuff to date, but it is a good way to save some money... and you can even extend the life of your printer if you modify to expel any waste ink to an external tank.. (Epsons in particular need this).

 

 

Just as an example though.. when I started out we popped a couple of C84's into my first school a few years back and found that not only did printing increase (people actually found it worked!) but when you considered the cost in broken (clogged, etc) printers and cartridge replacements, etc... they've saved over £3k in less than 2 years since we started keeping track... Oh and the printers are still going strong after 2 service resets (waste ink tank full) and a single maintenance routine (cleaning cartridges, etc..).

 

Not too shoddy when you consider what the actual cost is for getting yourself trained up..

 

Of course this doesn't solve the paper budget problem, in fact it probably makes it worse but it still means you aren't chucking money at Canon, HP, and Epson for their champagne...I mean ink..

[ChrisH]

Interesting stuff I have never heard of these systems....

[contink]

Interesting stuff I have never heard of these systems....

I only heard about them originally through ebay of all places and I was just looking for some refill ink for an old Epson 740 a few years back.

 

I then found a few companies that do them and my engineering genes took over from there, so I build my own kits now and do a lot of testing on new kits and printers.

 

One word of warning though.. most of the kits on Ebay are cheap knock offs with lousy support and poor build quality so if you are thinking of trying your hand it's worth going with a proven company and inks.

[SpuffMonkey]

Buy yourself a couple of Digital Photography type mags - they usually have a range of continuous ink feed suppliers