No joke! Small brown ant colony under scanner glass.

[Mamasan]

I am completely disgusted, grossed out, and very unhappy!

I have a Brother printer MFC-J825DW almost a year old. It was brand new, when my family paid for it for last X-Mas. I live in an apt. and the whole building has small brown sugar ants. Normally you only see them around the sinks, and not very many at that. (2 bathrooms also). The building manager gave us traps which obviously don't work and they don't seem to care for taro.

The other day I went to make a copy of something and when I lifted the cover I saw what at first i thought was sawdust. My son came over and said it's an ant colony. I freaked!!

My problem is getting the scanner glass off all the way. I've removed 8 screws from under the the glass's plastic enclosure, and I can lift the glass away from it's plastic encasement partially enough, about 1 1/2 inches, to get taro and cotton balls soaked with alcohol under the glass. Those nasty little eggs keep hatching though! Uck, uck, uck.

I called Brother and of course they said they don't recommend owners removing the glass themselves, and I told them I don't care and asked if they could send me documentation on how to remove the glass. Instead since it's under warranty they gave me the number to the tech co. in my area that does their warranty service. Well they only cover parts, not labor and said I'd need to bring it in or pay for a service call. What? I can't drive because of epilepsy and I'm NOT taking it on the bus. They also wouldn't email any documentation. In fact the girl I spoke with said what the techs do for servicing equipment is use the manuals and google. I'm never going to call them for anything except replacement part because I built my pc using the same methods.

I'd be really surprised if someone has had this problem before, I'll take a software problem any day.

I really need help. Please!!

 

[hang-the-9]

There is no way you will be able to clear out the ants without damaging the device. Even if they all die, there will be a thousand dead ants in the thing.

Put the thing in a plastic bag, get what air you can out of it, tie it. The ants will die due to lack of air and food soon enough.

I do have to say this is one heck of a classic issue. If you can post pictures would be great.

I've seen snakes in computers get killed when they tried to crawl into the power supply for the heat, rodents, never heard of an ant colony setting up shop in a printer.

 

[Mamasan]

Oh trust me, I'm killing them, but I still want to give it a shot. The eggs are stuck on the scanner's roller bar. It is so nasty, plus I won't ever be able to scan anything. I can get quite a bit of the printer case off, and the alcohol killed the adult ants under the glass, or else they scurried further into it. I"ll spray out as much of the printer's innards as I can with the spray dust remover. I'm just trying to figure out how to get under the scanner glass. If someone put it on, it should be able to be taken off carefully, hopefully.

My doom and gloom son is insisting the ants themselves have destroyed it, but I just printed some coupons out before I even discovered them, so it was/is still working. Because he reads a lot he also told me that when a colony starts dying the live ones run as fast as they can to set up a new home. He's insisting they'll also escape from the plastic bag. He just wants me to through it out, without even trying. Well I'm stubborn and sometimes you can't reason with him because he's 25 and has Asperger's, so we make quite the pair. He does like having his own little ant farm though. :lol:

I wouldn't be happy about a snake or rodent but at least he could grab them by the tail and get rid of them. Not me!

He took some pics so I will try and post them.

Thank you so much for your reply!

 

[Mamasan]

Best answer selected by Mamasan.

 

[jacintamartin]

Same exact problem. Brother MFC-J435W
Except these nest building ants have cut the power in the machine. This is so strange why do they want to build their nests in these printers?
I discovered the problem because my power would not go on! Clever ants cut the power to protect themselves.. Wow!
Am going to call Brother tomorrow.. This is crazy