I read an interesting article (the link is at the bottom) that talks about how printers waste over 50% of their ink on not printing! Most inkjet printers go through a cleaning cycle every time they are powered on. Some printers (especially HP & Lexmark) will literally burn a significant amount of your ink doing this “cleaning” cycle. Even if you rarely print – you may find yourself replacing ink cartridges frequently.
What can you do? The easiest idea is to leave your printer turned on all the time. Since it will be in sleep mode, the electricity used will be small. If you print significant amounts of black & white – you may want to use a laser printer – they are lower cost for higher volumes and do not have a head cleaning cycle such as an inkjet printer.
If you find your inkjet printer is not doing a good print job – you may want to turn it off & then back on to have it go through the head cleaning cycle but this should not be needed more than once per month.
Here is the link for the full article http://finance.yahoo.com/news/guzzling-printers-waste-100-ink-113313676.html