8 Ways To Save Money Printing In Your Home Office

Despite predicted savings on commuting-related costs and shopping for work attire, working from home involves several unforeseen costs. From increased electricity bills to new office supplies, working from home can get a bit pricey!

“Employees may be incurring the costs of basic office supplies (think ink cartridges) and they may even be purchasing desks, chairs, monitors and other critical office items.”

- Patrick Donnelly, Vice President & Senior Financial Advisor at The Colony Group

Many employees have found themselves investing in new monitors, laptops and printers, for example, to work as efficiently from home as they would in normal circumstances. 

Contrary to popular belief, using your printer does not have cost a fortune. In fact, home printing can be cheap if you follow our 8 top tips and tricks for saving money printing in your home office. 

1. Print Only Essentials

Carefully consider what documents actually need to be printed. Avoid printing unimportant files such as:

• Conversational emails
• Non-contractual documentation i.e. read only documents

If you are printing these documents for the sole reason of making them easier to read, try resetting your monitor's font and font size to one more legible (Georgia or Helvetica, for example). 

How To Increase Text Size on Google Chrome, Windows 10 and Mac

If you are printing documents to physically sign and rescan, consider creating an electronic signature. This option will help to reduce your carbon footprint, save you valuable time and ink!

How To Create An Electronic Signature

2. Buy Only High Quality Capacity Cartridges

Many ink and toner cartridges are offered in multiple forms - look for those marked ‘XL’ or ‘HC’ to reduce printing costs per page

See all of our high capacity compatible inks here

3. Buy Multipacks

Many ink cartridges are offered in CMYK multipack options. Purchasing these colour multipacks can save you 10-30% more than purchasing individual alternatives. 

Buying multipacks will also ensure you always have inks in stock. No more empty cartridge surprises!

Find all of our multipack ink cartridges here. 

4. Buy Compatible Inks and Toners

Compatible inks and toners are third party manufactured products created to work with branded printers. These products face several quality checks and tests to ensure identical performance to their branded alternatives. Compatibles provide excellent quality ink with simply unbeatable prices. 

Shop our Dynamo compatible inks and toners here. 

5. Print Cheaper With Certain Fonts

Although it may seem like a small difference, fonts with larger lettering, many serifs and thick lines use more ink and toner. Ink saving fonts include:

• Century Gothic
• Garamond

Fonts to avoid if you wish to save ink include:

• Arial
• Trebuchet
• Tahoma

Where possible, you should reduce the document's font size, whilst remaining legible, to fit more text to a page hence reducing ink consumption. 

6. Colour or Monochrome?

It is commonly known that printing in black and white saves ink. Before printing, you should carefully consider if it is necessary for your document to be printed in colour. 

AVOID GREYSCALE

Many printers provide options to print in greyscale. Contrary to common belief, greyscale usually does not use black ink to create grey, in fact, it uses a mix of all colours. This means printing in greyscale is essentially the exact same as printing in colour - saving you nothing in terms of both ink and printing costs. 

7. Buy A New Printer!

Is your toner and ink too expensive? Have you had your printer for a long time? It may save you more money long-term to purchase a new printer for your home office. Smaller, more modern inkjets such as:

The HP M15W

With a cost of only €0.03 to print per page, you will not find a better deal for your home office guaranteed.
✅Cheap to run
✅Easy to use
✅USB & wireless.

The HP M404dw

The HP LaserJet Pro M404dn is small, efficient and fast, the best printer for home office use.
✅Small Carbon Footprint
✅Reasonable Price
✅Auto-Duplex (2-sided) print
✅Print Only
✅Prints 40 pages per minute
✅Mobile Device Connection

Older printers can reach end of life - i.e. no consumables are mass produced anymore. This makes it harder and more expensive to get a hold of inks and toners. 

8. Smart Page Layout

When printing large volume documents, look out for:

• Blank pages
• Pages with large, unnecessary graphics
• Unnecessary footnotes - eg. unimportant references or page numbers

If you do need to print large volume documents, try fit a few pages on one sheet. Use the 'Pages to - from' function to only print what is necessary. 

If you have decided to invest in a new printer for you home office, ensure it has the 'duplex printing' option. Your printer will be able to print on both sides of the paper automatically - saving you both paper and money!

See printers with 'duplex printing' options here.