Brother 'High Temperature': cooling the machine down

What causes it

• A genuinely hot room, such as a conservatory or a loft in summer
• The printer standing in direct sunlight
• Vents blocked by a wall, a cupboard or stacked paper
• Heat from other equipment, such as a stack of network gear on the same shelf
• A long continuous print run raising the machine's internal temperature

How to fix it, in order

Work down the list and stop when the printer recovers. The steps are ordered from most likely and least invasive to last resort.

1. Move the machine out of direct sunlight

   Sunlight through a window raises the surface temperature of a printer far above room temperature, and dark plastic casings absorb a great deal of it. Relocate the machine to a shaded spot, or close blinds during the hottest part of the day, and let it sit for half an hour before retrying.

2. Clear space around the vents

   Pull the printer out so there is at least ten centimetres of clear space behind and at each side, and check nothing is resting on top of it. Stacked paper, files and boxes on and around a printer trap heat exactly where it needs to escape, and this is the most frequently overlooked cause.

3. Let the machine rest with the power on

   Leave the machine powered on but idle for twenty to thirty minutes in a cooler spot. On most models the message clears automatically once the sensor reads a supported temperature and printing resumes without any further action. Powering it off is not necessary and does not speed things up meaningfully.

4. Check the room temperature honestly

   Use a thermometer rather than a guess. A room that feels warm can easily be above 35 degrees on a summer afternoon in a loft or a south-facing office. If the room genuinely exceeds the specification, the printer is behaving correctly and the answer is to cool the room or move the machine.

5. Break long jobs into smaller batches

   If the message appears during a large print run, the machine is generating heat faster than it can shed it. Print in batches of fifty or a hundred pages with a few minutes between them. This is a normal working practice for high-volume jobs in a warm environment.

6. Separate the printer from other heat sources

   Move the machine off a shelf shared with routers, network switches, a games console or a laptop dock. Those devices run warm continuously and raise the ambient temperature in their immediate area far above the rest of the room.

7. Check whether the message persists in a cool room

   If the machine still reports high temperature in a room at twenty degrees after cooling for an hour, the temperature sensor is faulty rather than the environment being wrong. That is a hardware fault and changes the decision from housekeeping to repair.

Frequently asked questions