How to save ink at home when printing

Don’t Pay for Wasted Printer Ink! Here are 8 Tips for Saving Ink When Printing at Home

It’s been said that printer ink is one of the most expensive liquids on earth. Indeed, the most expensive printer ink out there costs more than Chanel No. 5, ounce by ounce. So if you need to print often, you need to find ways to cut down your use of the liquid gold. Let’s take a look at some tips that will help you reduce your ink use overall and stop the unnecessary waste of ink on things that don’t really need to be printed.

1. Buy an efficient printer. The best way to save on ink costs is to shop for a printer with a low per-page cost. If you’re using an older inkjet printer, much of the ink might be wasted by being sprayed anywhere but the page. Upgrading to a newer, more efficient printer means less wasted ink and an overall reduction in cost.
2. Don’t print when you don’t need a hard copy. Take a tip from the bottom of all of those email signatures – save the environment and don’t print unnecessarily. Unless you absolutely need to have a hard copy (like a contract that must be signed), save the document in several places like the cloud and backup on a USB drive.
3. Use only black ink for text. If you must print out a document that contains color text, like a webpage, use only black ink. It will save you money and be easier to read.
4. Check the printing options for a “printer-friendly” option. Especially when printing from the web, look for a printer-friendly option in your printer’s options dialog box or on the webpage itself. This will avoid printing images and logos. Do you really need a hard copy of the stock photos next that recipe, anyways?
5. Use print preview. Before hitting print, click print preview first. This will show you exactly what the pages will look like before you print. There might be five pages of fine print at the bottom of that credit card statement that you didn’t notice before.
6. Keep your printer clean. Check the nozzles of inkjet printer cartridges regularly, and remove any built-up or dried ink. For laser printers, take the toner cartridge out and rock it from side to side a few times when you notice that print quality is deteriorating.
7. Don’t trust the low-ink warning lights. Unless you’re pulling an all-nighter to print out a report in the morning, running out of ink isn’t like running out of gas. Keep printing until you notice a loss in quality, and even then, try one of the methods in tip number 6 to keep printing a bit longer.

Conserve your color ink. Use color ink only when you absolutely have to impress whoever is going to be seeing what you’ve printed. Color printing just isn’t necessary for most things that are going to be kept in a file cabinet.