Printer ink is like liquid gold; in fact it is probably more expensive than that!
With that in mind, it is important to make sure you use it wisely.
If you find yourself going through a lot of ink, there are some relatively simple ways that you can make sure you squeeze every last drop out of that cartridge.
Leave your printer on
It seems counterintuitive when we are talking about saving money to consider leaving an electronic device switched on, however, this will save you a lot of ink.
Every time that you turn your printer on it completes a maintenance cycle that uses up quite a bit of ink.
According to tests conducted by Consumer Reports, many printers used as much ink to clean the print heads as they did for actual printing.
The tests revealed that leaving the printers on contributed to a noticeable reduction in ink consumption.
It also found that most inkjet printers consumed very little power when they were not in use, so it is not a situation where you are robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Print smarter
If you don’t need high quality sustainable printing every time, you really should print in draft mode.
Depending on what you are doing, it can be somewhat difficult to find in the printer preferences tab or the print dialog box, but this will save you a heap of ink in the long run and is well worth investigating.
Another tip is to remove all the useless ads and logos from a page if you are printing from the web. Good websites will offer printer-friendly versions of their stories, which automatically remove colour ads and images, but if they don’t try copying just the text if that is all you want and just print that instead.
Change fonts
When Consumer Reports tested fonts, it found it was possible to get 27 per cent more ink from cartridges when using Times New Roman rather than Arial. Calibri and Century Gothic both outperformed Arial as well.
Do you have any tips that you use to make your printer ink last longer?
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