OT: Sharing a telephone line with a fax machine?

[Fyron]

You only need a dedicated phone line if you want to be able to receive any fax at any time (such as if you were running a business). Otherwise, do as SJ said and only hook up the fax line when you are expecting a fax.

[Kamog]

Thank you for the quick replies. Since I only need to receive faxes occasionally, I'll follow your advice and connect the fax only when I need it.

I suppose that eventually, if I decide to get a cell phone then I'll just use that for voice and I could leave the existing land line hooked up to the fax. I use the same phone line for dial-up internet as well, but I'm not going to need to use the fax the same time as the internet.

[Suicide Junkie]

Yeah, if you're already sharing the line two ways, a third way won't make much difference to you

[geoschmo]

There are devices on the market that will automatically switch from teh phone line to the fax line when it senses an incoming fax signal. Here's one... I'm sure you'll find more if you google it. Try "fax phone switch" or something like that.

[Caduceus]

We have an HP3150 at home which I have been fairly happy with.

There was a paper-feeding issue which was settled in some sort of mass class action suit, to which I received a plastic doo-dad to stick to it which has corrected the problem. Then my wife was dusting it and it sucked feathers into the machine. Fortunately, this has cleared up over the last few months. But occasionally a feather will be spit out.

Don't plan on super-high quality scans unless you're willing to pony up the money.

The HP sits on the line and is set only to answer the phone if we manually tell it to. We have one line and DSL.