Printer Paper AND Saving Your Printer's Ink

Okay, so the following is no secret, at all, but here are some things I’ve been doing for YEARS to save printer paper and ink! (Ink being rather expensive to purchase!!)

Printer Paper
You know all junk mail you get in snail mail? Flip it over. If it’s blank on the back, throw it in your printer’s paper tray! I keep a box for one-sided 8.5″x11″ papers. It’s filled with one-sided junk mail, as well as hundreds of miscellaneous other pieces of paper, only used once.

Think about it: for whom are you most likely printing? If the answer is yourself, or someone else in your household, then does it matter if there’s something unrelated on the back? Most likely not. You’ll have to play with your printer to see how to feed the paper in, as it may not work exactly the same as mine. For me, I place the paper in blank side down, and it rolls up and prints on the blank side.

Ink & Ink Cartridges
Oh, how I wish I had heard Clark Howard’s podcast discussing the evils of printers, their ink cartridges, and his solution!! Kodak printers: you pay more up front for the printer, but the cartridges are extremely inexpensive, compared to other brands…

I digress. Like many of us, you, too, may have been suckered in to buying the “cheap” printer, only to discover how it guzzles those expensive ink cartridges; thus, making your deal quite a dud. Did you know you can change the default settings on your printer, so that you use significantly less ink each time. Here’s how:

If you don’t wish to make these your printer’s default settings, you can elect to do “grayscale” and “fast draft” when you know you’re printing something that doesn’t need to be polished, if you will. The steps are the same as above, except you select “printing preferences” from the main print command screen that will come up when you wish to print. (Does that make a lick of sense???)

One more trick for saving your ink: smaller font size. Yep. You may have read about this as a tactic for universities to save thousands of dollars each year. It’s true! I’ve been doing this for years. (And doing the opposite to stretch those papers in college, but that’s a blog for another day…) The same is applicable for wider and longer margins: it’ll save you paper, particularly if you only have one or two lines on another page. Try it!

Finally, along those same lines, if you’re printing from a website, try highlighting the text you wish to print, and when you go to print, look for the “selection” or “selected text only” option.

P.S. Once you have empty ink cartridges, consider recycling them. There are tons of programs that offer incentives to recycle your empty cartridges; Office Depot, for example, will give you $3 towards your rewards when you turn in your empties.

Readers: do you have additional tips and tricks to add to this collection? I’d love to hear about them! :o)

Keep on saving! :o)
--Barbara
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