Air Print does not work for me

I just bought a Brother HL-L2365DW laser mono printer in the hope of using Air Print from the family iPads and iPhones. I have an iMac and Billion 7404VGP also.

Air Print has been very problematic. I'm about 10 hours into trying to make it work consistently without success. It will work for a while, then all of a sudden the printer cannot be found. It works around 50% of the time.

Brother have said they think it is something to do with the router. When I power down the router and then power it back on, the printer usually becomes visible to devices again. Here is what Brother tech support said;

"The Apple AirPrint service uses specific ports to allow connection on a network.
If the ports are not open, this kind of issue will occur. Restarting the router will temporarily open the ports for a few minutes, and then it will stop working."

Try opening the following ports within your router:
· TCP 5297
· TCP/UDP 5298
· UDP 5350
· UDP 5351
· UDP 5353
· UDP 49159
· UDP 49163

Only problem is that I have little idea how to do this. I've done some research on it and I'm still very confused. From what I can discern it seems that to do the required port forwarding I will first have to assign a static IP to my iMac, all iPads and iPhones that want to use the printer. That's just the start. Surely getting a printer to work at home wasn't meant to be this complex.

I thought this printer would seamlessly work as it has the Air Print logo on it. I was wrong. It has been a huge hassle and I am close to returning it. It seems that getting this Air Print system to work requires skills well beyond those held by the average home user like me. Creating Static IP addresses, port forwarding in routers, virtual servers etc, not exactly plug and play. Do I need a new router to make it work?

This new HL-L2365DW replaced a Brother HL-2135W which ran out of toner. It worked fine and never had these issues.

Any help appreciated