Energy & consumables

Posted on 3 Sep 2008 at 11:47

Up to £260, over the panel's quoted 15-year lifetime.

Duplex/economy mode printing

One ridiculously simple way to reduce the amount of paper you shell out for: print on both sides. An increasing number of low-cost lasers have duplex mechanisms built in, which will automatically print on both sides of the paper - just check the option in the printer driver before you hit the Print button. Canon's LBP3360 and Epson's EPL-6200 are two recent examples, and both cost only around £150 inc VAT. A second extremely simple option is to set your printer to draft or economy mode by default. You'll save ink, and pages will probably print faster into the bargain.
Duplex plus draft printing saves around £5 per 500 sides printed.

Don't buy a printer - use online print services

The entry cost of printers is incredibly low these days, as you can see by turning to our Labs. But while the cost of the hardware is amazingly low, consumables can really make a dent in your bank account. A 6 x 4in photo on premium paper can cost around 25p per print.

Upload your JPEG files to one of the online print services and you can bring that down to less than 10p. You need to take postage costs into account: the lowest prices come if you're ordering 50 prints or more, so you'll get the biggest savings if you save up your shots and do a bulk order. Our favourite online service www.photobox.co.uk offers 6 x 4in prints for 10p, going as low as 4p for 500+ prints.
Around £15 for 100, 6 x 4in photos printed with Photobox.

Buy a laser instead of an inkjet

The majority of home users buy an inkjet printer for photos but, in practice, the majority of actual printing tends to be text documents and web pages: perfect laser-printer territory. Turn to p29 and you'll soon see colour lasers are no longer expensive: our A-Listed Brother HL-5240 is just £132 inc VAT. A replacement toner cartridge costs £46. That might sound costlier than the £15 or so you can pay to replace an inkjet printer's cartridge; the difference is the Brother will last for 7,000 pages to the couple of hundred of an inkjet.
Between £50 and £100 per year for regular printing.

Sign off from SETI

Donating spare computing cycles to the search for alien life may have seemed fun when electricity bills were usually in double, rather than triple, figures, but are distributed computing projects such as SETI@Home worth the bother now?
Perhaps only a few pounds a year, but every little helps.

Dump online storage for offline

The humble DVD may not be quite so fashionable or, indeed, convenient as a full-blown RAID-equipped NAS when it comes to backup, but you can't argue when it comes to value. With DVD-Rs costing pence, they're an incredibly cost-efficient tool for the home and small offices. What's more, a burned DVD sucks no watts.