As your kids get older, their schoolwork becomes more electronic than manual. While your school may have provided you with a forest's worth of study materials on paper and expected you to hand write your homework and projects, your child is more likely to receive electronic copies of paperwork and to do their homework on a computer.
Once you hit this stage, you experience one of the hidden costs of having a teenager—printer ink. Your child may have to print out reams of sheets, homework, projects and revision materials, sucking ink out of your printer faster than they can empty your fridge of snacks. While your colour printer may have been relatively cheap to buy, replacing its inks is likely to be more expensive. How can you reduce your ink costs?
Change the Printer Settings
By default, your colour printer is usually set to print out a high-quality colour print. While this looks lovely, it also uses up your ink faster. High-quality black-and-white printing uses more black ink; colour printing will use up your coloured ink.
To make your inks last longer, it's worth changing your printer's settings. For example, if you make the default to print in greyscale, your printer will print everything in black and white. If you go for a lower quality fast print function, your printer will use up less black ink when it prints. You can still print in colour or in a higher quality by changing the settings on individual print jobs.
Make Your Teenager Print Aware
Most kids don't think about how much something costs until they need to buy it. It's worth educating your teen on how much it costs to replace printer ink. Once kids understand that this is quite expensive, they may be more willing to help you out. It's also worth making the following points:
- Ask your child to stop printing out everything automatically and to only print out stuff if they need a hard copy.
- Explain that you only need to print out in colour if you need colour on the page. For example, a homework sheet with no diagrams should be fine to print in greyscale; however, a project full of charts and graphs needs colour.
- Encourage your child to proof and spell check on the screen before printing. This should reduce the number of drafts that need to be printed out.
Tip: Schools are good at teaching kids how to take care of the environment. If your child is a bit blah about saving ink, they may take the point that printing endless reams of paper is bad for the environment.
Consider Other Ink Sources
Manufacturer branded inks are more expensive than generic products or ink refill services. If you use a lot of ink, these alternatives may save you some money. Bear in mind, however, that using non-manufacturer inks may invalidate your printer's warranty. If you're worried that you won't get your printer fixed if it breaks down because you haven't been using approved inks, you can always wait until it is out of warranty.
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