The Cost of Printing D & E Size Drawings

For the last 18 months I worked for a place which was on the cutting edge of paperless office. We hardly ever printed anything unless it was absolutely necessary. My new job is almost the opposite attitude. These guys print out paper at the drop of a hat. Yesterday, one of my co-workers was insisting on printing out an entire set of D size drawings on one of the large format laser printers we have. I tried to talk him out of it but the only thing that stopped him was the print job must have whacked the printer's memory because the job never got printed. I began to think about just how much it would have cost to print this set of drawings and did some google searches but only found the price for the printers themselves or other unrelated pricing information.

 

In my last job the PA knew exactly how much it cost to print an 11 x 17 sheet. I was told that they paid $0.16 per page, that's sixteen cents per page. Not much but when you need to print 10 sets of an 80 page document it adds up to several hundred dollars. So I was wondering if anyone could give me some accurate information on what it typically costs to print D and E size drawings on a large format laser printer.

they paid $0.16 per page, that's sixteen cents per page.

is that just the paper cost, or does it factor in ink or anything else?

My boss says he hates paper when I leave a note on his desk to phone someone. But won't hesitate to ask me to print drawings to look over repeatedly through the project process.

I'll admit that it's sometimes easier to look on paper.

...the cost of $0.16 per page included everything, paper, toner, electrical power, etc...It was provided to the PA from the vendor who sold us the printer, but this printer could only do 11 x 17 as it's largest size.

 

It's rather a matter of personal preference. Personally I find that with a dual monitor setup and a PDF tool like Revu I can be far more productive by viewing drawings than with a big pile of 24"x36" or larger sheets. And when it comes to making notes for a material take-off, the electronic process wins with me hands down. So my goal is to try and show not only the productivity improvements but especially the cost of printing so much paper. I know that to send the jobs out for printing at a commercial printer they charge about $1.50 (USD) per page for D size. Printing at our own location I assume would be less, but I'm trying to pin down an accurate number for my presentation. The printers we have are wide format laser, I don't recall the brand. It makes excellent prints and scans big drawings in as well.

 

I did a project late last year where we prepared the 30 something pages of shop drawings, submitted to the GC who then submitted to the architect, the review and markups were done and returned to us, we then made the revisions and resubmitted the file which was approved...and all of this was done without ever printing a single sheet of paper. Only once the installation in the field started did we ever print any real drawings. This saved at least $800 worth of printing costs alone, because instead of submitting 8 sets of 30 sheets at $1.50 each we only submitted a single PDF file via FTP. Saved on shipping costs as well.

I would go with $0.16 per 11"x17" page and figure 4 11"x17" per D size drawing, rolls of paper should be running less per sq. inch than sheets so that would provide some leeway.

I have a friend who gets his paper based upon square feet. He gets it at about 13 cents per sq. foot right now. Which is considered good rate now, but was not one year ago. He is there every day at 11 AM to get printing done of some sort. He most often hauls in 36 inch wide prints and then lets em' go.

 

Wm.

A 500 foot roll of 30" paper costs us $22. When it prints, it is 42" long or 3.6 feet. Doing the math, each sheet of paper costs $0.16 to print strictly in paper alone. Toner costs us $150 per cartridge and we can go through about 12k feet of paper before we have to change it which is about 24 rolls that are 500 foot long. Doing the math there, you're looking at about $0.05 per page worth of toner. So in all, less than a quarter each page.

 

Does that help some?

 

*EDIT*

For the record, I am a huge fan of paper. All companies I've worked for likes papers to be printed. It's just so much easier to handle instead of constantly looking a files on a computer screen. Granted, no sense in wasting paper but as long as it's being utilized then it's all good.

Once again it's all personal or corporate preference. I'm using Revu at this very moment with a split screen, comparing ASI's from the architect and the original bid set. It's making things quite easy as far as I'm concerned. I think that as we move through the next decade people will move away from the printed page more and more. It can't happen quick enough for me. But that's my preference. YMMV.

I think that as we move through the next decade people will move away from the printed page more and more.

I wouldn't be so quick to say that, personally. There's still plenty of years left for lots of people that like things printed versus not printed. In my field it's easier to be huddled around a table with 3-4 guys looking over a printed set versus everyone collaborating from their workstation, or even worse huddled around a computer monitor. Or when someone wants to single line a preliminary design for notes/reference, its just easier on paper first. Seems from your previous statements your office works the same as my office, in regards to the other coworkers and not specifically yourself.

 

The best thing I've always talked about is to have a large table display. Think of an HDTV lying on it's back, with a glass LCD so you can use a touch interface - like a giant iPad. This way you can open and review a digital set and mark it up, etc. I can see this happening very soon, but.... only the elite companies will be the first to adopt it.

We have a service agreement with the company we bought our plotter from and we pay $0.065 per sq ft. That includes paper, toner, preventive maintenance and labor if parts need to be replaced. That seems good versus paying to have your drawings plotted offsite.

 

As far as the paperless office goes, I love paperless on shop drawings but trying to estimate a job on the monitor is hard for me. I like to color code the different products we are using on different parts of the project. We will have curtainwalls, window walls, entrances and interior glazing. If someone knows a good way to do a thorough take-off without printing the plans I would love to hear about it. The days of General Contractors providing plans for estimating are long gone and all of the printing costs are on our shoulders. And that is just to bid the project.

We have a service agreement with the company we bought our plotter from and we pay $0.065 per sq ft. That includes paper, toner, preventive maintenance and labor if parts need to be replaced. That seems good versus paying to have your drawings plotted offsite.

 

As far as the paperless office goes, I love paperless on shop drawings but trying to estimate a job on the monitor is hard for me. I like to color code the different products we are using on different parts of the project. We will have curtainwalls, window walls, entrances and interior glazing. If someone knows a good way to do a thorough take-off without printing the plans I would love to hear about it. The days of General Contractors providing plans for estimating are long gone and all of the printing costs are on our shoulders. And that is just to bid the project.

 

The way we did take-offs at the dinosaur was to have the curtain wall or storefront or whatever drawn on a particular layer and as rectangles (a closed polyline, not 4 individual lines). The take-off tech would run a lisp that would look for everything on that particular layer and figure linear footage of the mullions, pressure plates and covers based on those rectangles. It would then output that information to a text file. They used this text file to feed some ancient dos based proprietary software that then did an optimized cut list and told you how many stock lengths of each you'd need. There was even a code built in to the lisp that distinguished vertical and horizontal pieces as they were quite often a different extrusion than the vertical pieces. You could then take the count of horizontal pieces and you'd know how many shearblocks you need, and that would tell you how many fasteners you needed. The dos based stuff would figure up how much standard gasket you needed based on these footages as well.

 

If yoiu had mixed product or some hinky covers on part of the curtain wall, it was a simple matter to use the format painter to move those to a different layer before running the extraction lisp. It would ignore anything not on the specified layer. Collect that data, then switch layers on what you just did to something else, put the hinky stuff back on the extractor's layer and run it again.

 

It would be simple for a good lisp programmer to run that info to a spreadsheet instead of a text file so you could manipulate it as needed.

Everyone has their own style but I think the day is coming that printing out plans just to do a bid will end. Face it, some sets of plans are hundreds of sheets and when you consider structural, architectural, etc...sets which need to be printed that can cost $100's for a job that has yet to produce any revenue.

 

I too have been in the glazing business for many years, and I use a program called Revu. It's a PDF program by a company called Bluebeam. You can color code, mark, make notes, calculate dimenions, square footages, lineal footage, or mm, check dimensions, count in sequence and if you change your mind and delete one or two it will automatically recount everything. On top of all that it keeps track of every little note and counter you make in a set and keeps it all in a little database that you can pop up anytime you need it. Sort, it rearrange it and it quickly exports to an Excel file and even opens up Excel with all your notes listed therein. The other thing I love about it is that 4 hours, 4 days, or 4 months later when you look back at the prints, all your notes are still there. And if you can't remember where you found something, just click on the entry in the database and it will take you to the exact location on the exact page where you found that little mirror the GC is insisting you pickup at no charge.

 

Now that I'm off that soapbox, I am totally convinced that the days are numbered for people who refuse to do a takeoff unless they have a full set of prints. A dual montior setup costs less than what one large set of prints costs to run off and it doesn't waste resources and money. Once you get the hang of it you can be far more productive in preparing takeoffs using PDF files rather than printed sets.