Here’s another interesting thread that I found on a forum:
This company had purchased a small brother MFP to only find out that the system died in about six months because of the environment that the system was placed in.
The industrial environment is a rock quarry! OMG, besides a concrete factory I couldn’t think of a worse place to have a copier. This particular user was asking for direction to what type of system he might be able to get that would give better performance.
Here’s my reply:
Rock quarry = very bad environment for any MFP. The Brother that you bought is considered a “throw away” system. Years ago I placed several units at a cement factory equally as bad as the rock quarry or maybe worse. You need to step up to an office system machine take a look here.
All laser-based MFP copiers use heat and pressure to fuse the toner on the paper, thus when the system is on, the system is always heating, cooling, and drawing in air from the environment.
Kev840 made a good suggestion, lease or buy a more robust system like I pointed out and buy a maintenance agreement, but do keep in mind that if the environment is too dirty the dealer can and may cancel the agreement because of the environment.
Here’s some things you can do to help your copier run cleaner:
1. When not using the copier, turn it off and place a cover over the system. (Years ago, a cover came with every new copier.)
2. Buy some Silica gel bags and place them in the copier paper tray to keep the moisture out of the unit.
3. Find the air intake area to the copier and place a strip cheesecloth over the air intake and replace this every month or so.
4. When you find the air intake there is usually and air filter in the better systems, see if you can buy a few extra from the dealer and change them every month.
5. Clean the optics (glass) and the slit exposure (usually located next the main copy glass and is maybe an inch wide at most) and the document feeder area every few weeks or month, you can use glass cleaner for the optics and soap and water for the feed tires (they feed the paper into the document feeder).
6. If the system has been sitting awhile, remove the old paper and put new paper in the system before you print or copy. Dust, dirt and grit will settle on the top page and you don’t want those foreign particles going through the copier.
7. Once a month take a can of air and blow out all of the dust and dirt from the paper trays.
8. The paper feed tires in the auto document feeder can be cleaned with soap and water, prepare a damp rag with a little soap on it and rub up the feed tires. When finished take a clean rag and dry the feed tires.
Always keep in mind that any laser-based copier/MFP works on static electricity. An electronic charge is applied to the drum and paper for every print, dust inside of the unit can become charged and then adhere to other areas of the device where you don’t want the dust to be.
If you take these precautions and get a system that is more worthy of your needs, I believe you can get many years out of another system. Hope this helps.
Good selling!
