Printer Service Byron Bay, Ballina and Lennox Head

The three towns on a map

Anyone planning a day here has to remember how spread out this coast is. This is how we group it.

Council desks, legal and medical offices in Ballina

Ballina is where the weight of the regional service economy sits. Council and government offices, solicitors and conveyancers, medical and dental practices, agents and the building trades are all close together. Their copiers are floor standing and shared, and they run jobs that must come out correct the first time: contracts, forms, plans, patient letters.

A finisher that jams on stapled sets, a feed roller that has polished smooth, a fuser that smears toner on a heavy stock. We see those over and over on shared machines, and we usually know what to bring before we are in the car.

Where the machine handles records about people, tell us. We brief the technician on your privacy rules ahead of the visit and the repair is done where the machine stands. Nothing leaves the building.

Lennox Head and the lake

Lennox Head has its own character: surfers, a lake, a village centre that feels like a main street. Real estate offices, accountants, a few practices and a lot of cafe and retail administration. Machines are small, rooms are small, and the copier often sits beside the kettle.

Which means kettle steam, milk dust and sunlight on the glass. We have lifted the lid on more than one scanner to find a film that wiped off in one pass, and the black streaks on the copies were gone.

The estate behind the town

The Arts and Industry Estate in Byron Bay is where the town's makers keep their tools. Furniture, signage, food production, boat and board shapers, trades with a trade counter at the front. Machines there print job cards, delivery dockets and invoices, usually a workgroup laser on a bench next to the phone.

A docket printer that dies at seven in the morning holds up a truck. We treat that call as seriously as a CBD copier. Tell us which unit, whether there is a front office or just a roller door, and who meets the technician. If there is a site induction or boots and hi vis rule, say so.

Humid summers, salt and the wet

This part of the coast is damp for months. Paper gains moisture, bows and jams. Machines near open doors take in dust, grit and sometimes insects, which show up as grainy marks and noisy feeds. A storm warning is a good moment to switch the copier off properly instead of leaving it to lose power by itself.

If your machine is worse in summer or after rain, say when you ring. Often the fix is a sealed ream kept off the floor, and we say so.

Brands in these offices

Ricoh and Toshiba fleets turn up in councils and agents, Kyocera in the schools and trades, and a long tail of Brother and HP lasers everywhere else. Canon and Konica Minolta show up in the creative end, where colour quality counts. We service all of them as an independent business, which means no brand to push and no reason to talk you into a replacement.

Calling from the villages

Suffolk Park, Ewingsdale and Bangalow in one direction, Alstonville and Wollongbar on the plateau behind Ballina in the other. Say the village and the road. We plan the visit around the machine and the building, and where more than one office on the street has a problem, one trip can cover them.

If the lines are busy when you phone, the call is logged and returned the same day. Same day service is available, and we are straight about what can be arranged.

Holiday managers, cafes and the festival calendar

Byron's year has peaks you can set a diary by. Summer holidays, the long weekends, and the big events around the shire, Bluesfest at Tyagarah among them. Holiday letting managers, accommodation offices and food businesses print booking sheets, check in lists, supplier orders and rosters in great quantity, and then go quiet for a month.

That stop and start pattern is hard on a laser printer. Toner that has sat in a hot room sets in clumps, rollers lose their grip, and the first morning of the rush is the first time anyone finds out. If you run an accommodation office, ring a fortnight before the busy period and we will have a look at the machine while it is still quiet.

Hospitality administration usually has a very small footprint, a printer on a shelf behind a desk, so we ask about the shelf. Is there a gap for air to move, is it near the steam of a kitchen, is it standing on something that vibrates. A surprising number of faults start with where a machine was put.

Scan to email, and the router that got swapped

The commonest call that is not really a mechanical fault is a scanner that has stopped sending. In a small office, someone changed the internet plan, a new router arrived, an address changed or a mailbox password was reset. The copier is still trying to send mail using the old settings and reporting a failure.

We can often sort that out on the phone if the office can read us the error and the address the machine is using. If it needs a visit, the technician fixes the settings and tests a scan to a real inbox before leaving, because a test that only shows a sent message on the panel proves very little.

Many Byron offices have a local IT person who does the network on a part time basis. Put us in touch and we work with them, so each of us does the job we are good at.

What the technician carries

The van holds the common consumables and spares for the makes we see most: feed rollers, separation pads, fuser parts, drive gears, cleaning blades, and a selection of colour imaging parts. We cannot carry every part for every model, and we say so. What we can do is plan the load from what you tell us, which is the reason for all those questions on the phone.

If a part has to be ordered, the technician tells you on the day, books the return before leaving and leaves the machine as usable as it can be. Our work is warranted, and we explain what that covers when we quote.

Keep reading

Photocopier repairsAny make of office copier, repaired where it stands.→Commercial printer repairsWorkgroup lasers and fleets, repaired where they sit.→Ricoh repairsIM C, IM and MP series, plus Lanier and Savin badged machines.→Canon repairsimageRUNNER ADVANCE, DX and i-SENSYS, repaired on site.→Lismore and the Northern RiversLismore, Goonellabah and the Northern Rivers hinterland: hospital, university, council, farm suppliers and small firms.→Mullumbimby, Brunswick Heads and Ocean ShoresMullumbimby, Brunswick Heads and Ocean Shores: studios, clinics, farms, tourism operators, builders and small firms.→Kingscliff, Tweed Heads South and PottsvilleKingscliff, Chinderah, Tweed Heads South, Banora Point, Cabarita Beach and Pottsville.→