Working from home led many of us to buy a home office printer. (If you’re still looking for the best home printer for your needs, check out our guide.) Whether you bought a laser printer to handle high volumes of text-heavy documents or an inkjet printer for schoolwork and photos, the sticker price represented only one part of ownership costs. Eventually, you will need to replace the ink or toner cartridges. Here are a handful of consumption-friendly tips to get the most out of every cartridge.

Use draft mode

Draft mode – also known as fast mode – prints at a lower resolution so the text will be slightly lighter. Use it when high-quality hard copies aren’t necessary, say when documents are for your own reference or are early versions of what could be many rewrites.

Print in grayscale

If your printer allows, select “grayscale” for jobs that don’t require splashes of colour. Grayscale reduces your consumption of black ink – it combines black and coloured inks to create gray. It’s great for printing graphs and charts for your own use.

Choose a light font

Each font’s unique look requires a different amount of ink to print. You’ll use less ink printing a simple sans serif such as Century Gothic or Calibri – a common default in word processing programs – than Arial, the default in many browsers. Limiting bold font in your final printout also conserves ink. Even dropping one point size – for example, from 11-point type to 10-point type – leaves a little extra ink in the cartridge.

Use every drop of ink

Canon printers alert you when ink is running low. However, this heads-up comes in advance of your printer actually running on empty. You can continue printing for a short while. Keep an eye on the ink levels, and at the first sign of compromised output quality, replace the cartridge. Printing with an empty cartridge can damage the print head.

Print multiple pages per sheet

Your printer’s properties allow you to print up to 16 pages of a document on a single piece of paper. Consolidating multiple pages on one sheet saves not only ink but also paper. (You can also save paper by utilizing the duplex function and printing on both sides of a sheet.)

Print regularly

Ink cartridges can dry out if unused for an extended period. Printing even a couple of pages a week prolongs their life. Make sure to print from both your colour and black cartridges.

Consider total cost of ownership

If you’re a high-volume printer, you may want to pay a little more upfront to save on ink down the road. Canon’s G-Series MegaTank Refillable Ink Printers come with ink equivalent to 30 conventional ink cartridge sets^, all but ensuring you won’t have to worry about changing printer ink anytime soon. The replacement ink bottles can print up to 6,000 black-and-white documents and 7,700 colour documents.

Keep the printer area clear

Set your printer up in a space free of dust and drafts, conditions that could dry the ink in the print head more quickly. Consider covering the printer when not in use. Most printers support Wi-Fi, allowing you to print from anywhere in the house. Send print jobs from the comfort of your air-conditioned home office to a room more removed from the cool draft.

Perform regular maintenance

A buildup of dried ink can clog the printer’s nozzles. Following the cleaning recommendations in the manual will extend the printer’s use. With laser printers, ink toner can settle over time, especially if it hasn’t been used for a while. Simply remove the cartridge and give it a couple of shakes.

Proof before you print

Edit your documents onscreen first. Odds are you’ll find a few annoying typos, and you can save yourself a reprint. Print only what you need – for example, if only the most recent message of an email chain is relevant to you, limit the print range to just the first page. Between digital signatures and the list of recipients, an email chain can quickly turn into multiple pages. Preview web articles to make sure you’re not getting 10 pages of comments.