There are several things to consider when choosing whether to keep your printer on or off when you are not using it, and there is a lot of conflicting information about what is best. Ink consumption, printer health, and power consumption are all part of the ultimate question: what is more cost effective?

Here are three reasons keeping your printer on is, counter-intuitively, the better way to go.

Is it better for your printer to be off or on between use? Because of new printer technology, energy saving mode allows the printer to be barely active while still being on.

In fact, powering on and off is a lot more strenuous for the printer and will decrease your printer’s lifespan.

Instead, keeping your printer on ensures there is always a small amount of power flowing through, which keeps basic systems operational, and allows the printer to be usable much faster and with less burden on the hardware.

Printers perform regular maintenance cycles, which means they use printer ink to clean the print heads. This is an important and necessary process to ensure your printer is well-maintained and lasts as long as possible.

The problem is that when your printer switches on, it automatically triggers this maintenance cycle. The last thing you want is for your printer to chew through ink unnecessarily, because it will cost you money.

Keeping your printer on ensures that this maintenance process happens only when required, which will keep your printer in good condition without using ink unnecessarily.

A lot of people think this is where keeping your printer on gets expensive. Your printer will use more power on than it will off, but printers in standby mode use about 3 watts of power.

Over a year would cost you in single digits. However, this figure presumes your printer is on standby all year without any use, which is obviously not going to be the case for most people, but it highlights how little it costs to keep your printer on all the time.

There is no doubt that keeping your printer on is the more cost-effective option. It will allow your printer to stay in good condition for longer, which costs you much less over a lifetime of buying printers.

You will also save on ink because your printer will only perform maintenance cycles when required, rather than every time your printer turns on.

The only area in which you may spend more is in power consumption, but you’re looking at paying just a few dollars a year, far less than the cost of turning your printer off when you aren’t using it.