How to Achieve Cost and Energy Savings on a Copier
Whether you want to reduce your business’s carbon footprint or save money on energy, you can do both just by using your copier wisely. The amount of energy this piece of equipment uses in a single day has more to do with how it is used and treated especially when it is not being used. Here are a couple of ways you can reduce your business’s energy bill by using your copier smartly:
Power down after use
If you have an old copier, it means you also know that it takes some time for it to power down and restart. It can be tempting to leave the machine on all night long to avoid that delay but think of all of the energy it will consume by the next morning!
It just takes a couple of minutes to save big bucks. Make sure to switch off the copier at the end of the day and wait for it to power down completely. Waiting for just a couple of minutes can help you save more money that can be utilized elsewhere.
Use energy saving settings
Copiers come with in-built features whose purpose is to save energy as much as possible and these are quite similar to what you can find on laptops and operating systems. One of them is ‘Sleep’ mode which shuts down systems that are not in use after a while.
Copiers can do that as well so unless yours is used to print out high volumes of paper regularly, you don’t need to have it on all day. If you don’t need it for a couple of hours, allow it to go on sleep mode or better yet, turn it off. You will save a lot of money down the line this way.
A number of models also have quality settings that can be tweaked for the same purpose. In other words, if you use lower quality print or draft mode when you are printing pages, you can save a lot of ink. If you print in color, your copier does not use more energy than it does when you print in draft mode but that depends on the machine you have. That’s because most colors have different rates of use but you will need to replace the cartridge anyway.
By using the Draft mode of your printer, you can reduce the amount of energy your copier uses as well as the amount of toner. Enable it for every use unless you need to print out copies for presentations.
Colors matter
Colored pages cost more than mono pages and the copier also takes more time to print them out. That is a waste of time and money that can be easily utilized elsewhere. All you need to do is determine your color requirements.
You can do that easily with print management software that allows you to have complete control over which of your employees can use color and who cannot. This will go a long way in helping you keep tabs on how much energy is being used and prevent unauthorized use.
Finally, buy Copier or Multi-function Product (MFP) with an efficient Power Consumption.
