At an office where I work, there is a Samsung CLP-310 laser printer:
The staff turn this off every evening. Right off -using the hard power switch on the back. They are trying to reduce their impact on the environment, but it doesn't make much difference (we have cheap, environmentally-friendly hydroelectricity), and this just causes a lot of inconvenience in the mornings.
The printer has no power over night and, it seems, is forced to run extra maintenance routines when it is turned back on the next day. I am not convinced that fully disconnecting it from the power every single day is such a good idea- as takes much longer to start printing in the mornings, and probably wastes toner when performing these extra warming-up/calibration steps.
In addition, people in the morning often have to wait a much longer time to retrieve their documents, as they usually only discover the printer is still turned off at the back when they walk up to it to pick up their work.
We are based in Vancouver, where electricity is cheap (only $0.069/kW.h).
The printer uses only 10W in standby, which works out as $0.00069/hour here. To save a single Canadian dollar, they would need to turn this device off for nearly 1,500 hours.
To put it another way: this printer is on 12 hours a day, for 6 days a week. That leaves 96 hours/week that they don't use it, or 4992 hours per year.
4992 hours x $0.00069 = $3.45 savings per year (before you take into consideration the cost of extra power and toner used when powering up from a cold start 312 times per year).
They have 2 other printers (one inkjet, one laser), but always leave them on standby. The reason? There is no green standby LED on the other printers so, psychologically, they feel like the other printers don't use power in standby mode. Not to mention, they have a big domain controller (4 internal drives) and a print server, that are both on 24/7, as well as 25 PC which are always on standby (Wake on LAN enabled, used for LogMeIn). What's an extra 10 Watts, if it makes peoples lives easier every morning?
Oh… and in the winter they put a couple of electric heaters on to keep staff warm at their desks. 1,500W each!
I am considering recommending that they stop shutting this printer down all the time using the main power switch as it wasn't designed to be used that way. This will stop staff having to wait around for their documents every morning. Waiting 2 minutes extra per day adds up to 8 hours per year. That's 8 hours of waiting, for $3.45 (or less) in electricity savings.
Is this a reasonable suggestion to make given the circumstances?
Best Answer
Regardless of whether the printer is off or in standby, it will still run the same maintenance functions when it comes back up. With lasers that is nothing much, but does include heating up the fuser, spinning motors to make sure they're all in the correct position, etc. As most modern lasers use very little power in standby, many people don't worry about it. Yes, switching it off is "greener" but you have to balance that against the inconvenience of having to make sure it is switched on when you start work.
My wife switches our home laser off immediately after every print. I'm not sure that saves anything, especially if she wants to do several prints within minutes of each other.