Low power printer/scanner

I don't know if this is important to many of you but I thought I would share.

I've been looking at placing some type of all-in-one printer/scanner device in our semi-trucks. Right now our guys pay $2 for the first page and $1 page after to fax paperwork to the office. They also have a need to print bills-of-lading while on the road.

I did some research on printing and scanning with smart phones. The cost to install even netbooks in trucks was more than the budget allows. The printer line that stood out was the Brother MFC J series inkjets.

I bought an MFC-J410W. It was on sale at Office Depot for $70. Plugging it into the kill-o-watt showed less than 20 watts on startup. During printing and scanning it would occasionally hit 10 watts. Idle was 4 watts!

I took it out to the garage and connected it to a cheap black&decker 100watt inverter with a DC amp meter. With the printer connected and DC load did not change. I left it running for a couple of days and did some scanning and printing. There were no hot spots felt on the printer so it does not seem to mind the inverter. I suspect nothing in the printer runs on A/C.

I've sent the printer off to a friend to crack it open. He is going to examine it to see if we can run this off 12v. If so this is going to be a nice unit for use in the trucks and for off-grid use.

Brother supplies a free program for scanning and photo printing on Android and iPhones. Unfortunately it is only photo printing. I had to get another program called PrinterShare to print PDF's. Only the paid version ($5) supports printing directly to the printer. The free version uses a convoluted routing through their server back to a desktop computer to print.

I'll post an update when I find out if we can run this on 12v.

In case you are wonder whey I went this route. Mobile printers and scanners usually start around $300 EACH and still require a laptop. Not cost effective for my needs.