One town, two states
Queensland does not observe daylight saving and New South Wales does, so for about half the year the two sides of Boundary Street are an hour apart. A business on the Tweed side may book a technician by a New South Wales clock while the machine and the person with the key are in Coolangatta. When we arrange a visit we confirm the time and the side of the border, and where it matters we say whose clock we mean.
The border also shapes the paperwork. Firms that work across both states keep two sets of forms, two sets of references and sometimes two sets of registrations. A copier does not care, but the person running the office does, and a machine that scans to two different folders for two different states has more settings than most.
Griffith Street, Wharf Street and the shops between
Coolangatta's main street is Griffith Street, which runs back from the beach with shops, cafes, agents, small practices and professional rooms. Marine Parade carries the beachfront apartment buildings, and the property managers who look after them. Over the border, Wharf Street and the streets around Tweed Heads hold clubs and a similar mix of small offices.
Tweed City and the commercial areas inland have their own offices, practices and retail administration. Between the highway and the river there is a lot of ordinary small business, and a lot of machines that have been working steadily for years.
Retirement living and aged care administration
The border towns have an older population than most of the coast, and the care sector has grown to meet it. Retirement villages, aged care providers and the agencies that support them run busy administration offices. They print resident agreements, care plans, rosters, medication charts, forms for families, invoices.
Those documents are sensitive. Machines that scan keep images on an internal drive, and aged care providers often have strict rules about that. Tell us when you ring and the technician is briefed before arriving. The work is on the machine, not on the documents, and nothing leaves your premises.
Care offices also want quiet. A technician who comes to the office and fixes the machine in place, without noise near residents, is the right arrangement. Ask us to plan around visiting hours if that matters.
The airport side
The Gold Coast Airport sits beside the border at Bilinga and Coolangatta, and the businesses that depend on it are scattered nearby: freight and courier operators, car rental offices, tour and booking desks, and the companies that service planes and the buildings around them. Their printing is operational. Manifests, delivery dockets, invoices, labels.
Label printers and thermal machines are as important as copiers in these offices. If a label printer is the fault, say so. We repair desktop and workgroup printers, and we will tell you straight away if a label machine is outside what we do.
Faults we hear about down here
Salt air gets into all of it. A Coolangatta office a block back from the beach will see the effect on glass, fans and paper over time. Keep paper sealed and clean the scanner glass with a dry cloth.
- Paper that has swelled in the humid months, jamming the drawer in the afternoon
- Printers on the Tweed side that stopped talking to a computer after a network change
- A scanner that stops sending to a shared folder after the office moved to a new internet provider
- Streaks and smears on forms that people need to sign
- Old HP and Brother machines that have run for years and need a roller or a fuser
Small businesses on both sides
Off the main streets, the border towns are full of small firms that keep a single machine for everything. A surveyor, a boat broker, a bookkeeper, a physio, an agent. One printer, one scanner, one bundle of paper in a cupboard. When it fails, the office has no spare.
We keep our approach simple for those. Tell us the make and model, what it printed last and what it is doing now. If it is a quick fix, we say so on the call. If a part is needed, we say which and agree the price. We are not trying to turn a small repair into a big job.
A quick word on forms that cross the border
Accountants, conveyancers and agents who work on both sides print a lot of two state paperwork. A Queensland contract and a New South Wales one differ in page counts and attachments, and a long set that has to be stapled in order is a good test of a finisher. If yours has started to jam on long sets, say so. Finisher faults rarely fix themselves, and the cost of an error on a signed contract is more than the cost of a visit.
If you scan these sets, check the output after a service. A feeder that has been cleaned and adjusted should leave scans straight and in order, and a quick test on a real set tells you.
Humid summers, wet seasons
The southern end of the coast gets its share of storms. Power surges and sudden outages damage boards and drives, and a roof leak can drip into a printer on a shelf. If a storm has been through, switch the machine off and unplug it before anything else if you see water near it. Let it dry fully before you try again.
After an outage, a printer that fails to start is more often confused than broken. Switch it off at the wall for a minute and try again. If it comes up with an error on the panel, write the message down and ring.
Quiet times for a visit
Coolangatta slows in winter, when the beachfront apartments and cafes run at half pace, and that is a handy time to book a proper look at a machine that has been sulking. In peak summer and school holidays everyone is flat out, and a copier that needs a roller replaced is better dealt with before the rush than during it.
Brands
The towns lean on HP and Brother for desk machines, with Canon, Ricoh, Toshiba and Kyocera copiers in larger offices. We service all of them and others. Our loyalty is to the office with the faulty machine, not to a brand.
Repairs happen at your premises, 98% of them are fixed on the first visit, and if the same fault returns we fix it again at no charge.
Tourism and accommodation offices
Coolangatta and the beachfront run on visitors. Holiday apartment managers, tour operators, surf and activity businesses, and the agents who let units each have an office with a printer. Their busy times are school holidays and long weekends, and a failure in the middle of a changeover day is the worst timing.
Changeover paperwork is heavy: keys lists, check out inspections, guest information. If your machine has been sluggish, a service before the holidays pays off.
Phoning from either side
Give us the street, the suburb and the state if there is any doubt. A Boundary Street address can be either. Tell us the make, the model and what the screen says, and we agree the price before anyone is booked. Messages are checked and each call logged and returned.
A long strip of coast
Several offices, one steady standard
We work around that. The technician knows the model and also asks how this particular machine lives. A copier near the sea breeze has a different life to one in an air conditioned suite at Robina.
If your business has more than one site we are glad to keep the records for each machine together, so the second branch benefits from what we learned at the first.
- Each machine on its own. Location and use shape what we look at.
- Sites kept together. One set of notes across your offices.
- Same standard everywhere. The same careful job whichever branch rings.
Keep reading
Photocopier repairsAny make of office copier, repaired where it stands.
Commercial printer repairsWorkgroup lasers and fleets, repaired where they sit.
HP printer repairsLaserJet codes read like a sentence. We read them aloud.
Brother repairsReplace Drum, Print Unable, TS-02: what each one means.Currumbin, Palm Beach and TallebudgeraPalm Beach, Currumbin and Tallebudgera: school offices, small practices, visitor businesses and valley farms.
Burleigh HeadsProfessional practices, design studios and growing firms by the beach
Tugun, Bilinga and the AirportTugun, Bilinga, Kirra and the airport side: transport and hire depots, clinics, hospitality offices and the university campus.
Kingscliff, Tweed Heads South and PottsvilleKingscliff, Chinderah, Tweed Heads South, Banora Point, Cabarita Beach and Pottsville.Murwillumbah and the Tweed ValleyMurwillumbah, Tumbulgum, Uki, Tyalgum and Burringbar: town offices, farms, packing sheds and studios.
Byron Bay, Ballina and Lennox HeadByron Bay, Lennox Head and Ballina: creative studios, clinics, council offices and trade yards on the coast.Buy, sell and lease
Buy, sell and lease commercial copiers on the Gold Coast
We also sell new and refurbished commercial copiers and buy used ones. Same team, same technicians.
A few recent visits
Common questions from Gold Coast offices
Do you service both Coolangatta and Tweed Heads?
Yes, on both sides of the border, and the airport side too.
How do you handle the time difference in summer?
We confirm the time and the side of the border when we arrange the visit, and say whose clock we mean.
Can you attend an aged care office with privacy rules?
Yes. Tell us the rules on the call and the technician is briefed. The work is on the machine, not on the documents.
Do you repair label printers for freight offices?
We repair desktop and workgroup printers. If a label machine falls outside what we do we tell you at once.
Can you reach Coolangatta or Tweed Heads the same day?
Same day service is available on both sides of the border. Give us the street and suburb when you ring.
Our printer stopped working after we changed internet provider. Is it broken?
Often the machine is fine and the network address changed. A test page from the panel shows us whether the machine or the network is at fault.
Does salt air affect our printers?
Slowly. It affects glass, fans and paper. Keep paper sealed and clean glass with a dry cloth.
A storm took the power out and the printer will not start. What now?
Switch off at the wall for a minute and try again. If water has got near it, leave it off and ring. Write down any message on the panel.
We keep one machine for the whole office. What should we do before ringing?
Note the make, the model and what it printed last, and read the message on the screen. That is enough for us to say what we think is wrong and agree a price.
Which makes do you look after in the border towns?
HP, Brother, Canon, Ricoh, Toshiba, Kyocera, Epson, Fujifilm and others.
