One of the biggest items that takes most of my time in the evenings is preparing the mailers. I’m always keeping my eyes and mind open to ways of speeding up the process. Actually printing the letters and the envelopes takes a decent amount of time when you have to print hundreds of them. I usually print out all the letters first and then come back and print the envelopes. Both the notebook paper and the envelopes I use have to be loaded into the multi-purpose tray of my laser printer. I can load about 50 sheets of notebook paper at one time, but only about 5 envelopes and that is one of my time sucks! I have to always stick around to reload the tray. While the letters are printing I can do something else, but the envelopes I have to sit right by the printer to be ready with the next 5 envelopes. Quite annoying indeed.
Last week I noticed that while printing, the first 20 pages (or envelopes) would print out quickly. Each page would get sucked into the printer right after the other, but after that magic 20 mark the printer the printer would slow down noticeably. I timed it out and found that the first 20 pages printed in 62 seconds while the next 20 took 160 seconds. That is almost 3 times longer!! 3 seconds per page versus 8 seconds per page.
So what to do?
What I’ve found out is that when my printer starts to get over heated it slows down allowing it to cool off. To get around this “slow down” I’ve decided to print out the envelopes in sets of 20. While the printer cools off I stuff the letters into the envelopes and then repeat the process.
I’ve estimated that this saves me up to 7 minutes per 100 envelopes, so if I’m printing out 300 envelopes it saves me more then 20 minutes!! Which is huge when I only have 2 hours of free time a night and heck that is an hour and 40 minutes extra for the week! Just that little change has freed up quite a bit of time.
Does anyone know of a good envelope printing machine where I can just set it and forget it??
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Comments 5
I use a Canon MF4150 and I have the same exact problem with envelope qty. Envelopes can only be loaded about 8 at a time. Will be looking into a better solution in the near future.
Scott – I used to have the same problem. I finally called every local prining company where I live, and found that I could get 5000 envelopes for a little over $200.00 at one place. I bit the bullit and got the envelopes. It will enable you to get your mailing out quicker, plus you save on the hard costs. Not to mention, you’ll have more time with your family.Just order a more envelopes when you sell another house, and you will stay ahead.
Author
Did you have to supply the envelopes or where they included? 4 cents an envelope sounds pretty good, that would be good to have all my envelopes printed for the year in one shot though it would require planning out my entire year of mailings (which I have done). Good suggestion
Scott – I read your earlier posts and I believe you were writing all of your envelopes. I’m not sure when you changed over to printing the address on your envelopes, but have your response rates changed in doing so? I’ve created my font using YourFonts.com and am thinking about printing the addresses instead of writing out each one. I recently bought an Epson Workforce 845 which has 2 printing trays (500 paper capacity total) and can do automatic double sided printing, copying and scanning. It’s been great so far and seems to use much less ink than any other printer I’ve tried. I’ll let you know how the envelopes come out.
Author
I switched quite a long time ago, probably last spring. I haven’t really noticed much of a decline in my responses which is a good thing because hand writing those addresses was terrible!