"if you are not careful, colour lasers can be very expensive to run."
Very few colour lasers (even the el cheapo ones) run the colours if you only print mono (some of them have a setting to switch this in/out on a per page basis instead of per job) - but if there's ONE pixel of colour on the page, it's a colour page
The trick is to set the defaults to mono and make sure it's saved as systemwide