Photocopier Service Gold Coast

Who we look after

Mostly working offices. A medical centre in Southport that runs referrals and scripts through one machine from eight in the morning. A strata management firm in Surfers Paradise folding meeting packs for a dozen buildings. An accounting practice in Robina with a rush that starts in late June. A school office at Helensvale. A builder's yard office at Molendinar. A showroom at Burleigh. They have little in common except that somebody is waiting for a page.

We work on every major brand and lead with Toshiba, HP, Kyocera, Fujifilm, Canon and Ricoh, with Konica Minolta, Sharp, Brother, Epson and others behind them. We are an independent service business, not the maker and not a dealer for any of them, which means the advice on a service plan comes from what the machine needs and not from a parts catalogue we are obliged to push. Home and small desktop machines get looked at if somebody rings, but this page is written for commercial copiers.

How a visit runs, in the order it happens

People like to know what they are paying for before the technician arrives, so here is the sequence.

• The technician reports to reception and asks whoever uses the machine most what it has been doing lately. Which tray misfeeds on Mondays. Which setting someone changed last week. That conversation is the fastest diagnostic tool we have.
• The machine's own fault history and counters are read before anything is opened, so the page count can be compared with the age of each wear part.
• The paper path is opened and cleaned. Pickup and feed rollers are checked for glaze and flat spots, separation pads for wear, and the registration area for paper dust.
• The fuser area, the drum or imaging units and the cleaning parts are inspected with covers and light protection in place, because drums mark easily.
• The scanner glass, mirrors and document feeder are cleaned and checked, since those cause more complaints about copy quality than the print engine does.
• Anything near the end of its life is replaced from the van where the part is carried, or priced by phone before we order it.
• Test pages come out of every tray and the feeder, the staff who use the machine are shown anything that changed, and a short note of what was done and what is likely to need attention next is left with the office.

Plan, one off call or a managed fleet

The three arrangements suit different offices, and nothing is locked in on the first phone call. Here is how we think about them.

What we check, part by part

A machine usually fails in a predictable order, and a good visit works through it in that order. This is what each part tells us.

Why colour machines get a longer look

A mono copier has one drum, one developer and one toner path. Most of what wears out is in the feed rollers, the fuser and the drum. A colour machine has four of each plus a transfer belt that every colour crosses, and it has to keep all four lined up to a fraction of a millimetre.

That is why a colour copier produces faults a mono machine never does. One colour fades. One shade sits a hair to the left, so the black text has a coloured edge. A thin stripe appears in magenta and nowhere else. Ask us to look at a colour machine and we plan more time for it. If most of your printing is colour, tell us on the phone.

Offices wear a copier differently

A clinic prints letters and forms steadily from the first patient to the last, so the feed rollers and the fuser age at an even rate. A school office idles for weeks then gets asked for hundreds of pages at once in the first days of term, and rollers that have sat flat over the holidays are not at their best when the rush comes. A builder or trade office, with the machine in a shed or a demountable, has dust, heat and damp reaching the paper path faster than any other kind of office we visit.

Strata managers have their own pattern: a very quiet month, then agenda season with every building in the portfolio needing a pack by the same Friday. Accountants peak at end of financial year and again around tax time for individuals. Tourism and hospitality administration, which on the coast is a lot of offices, run to the calendar of school holidays, Easter and the busy summer weeks.

We ask how the machine is used before suggesting a visit, because the right cycle for a school is not the right cycle for a surveyor. Machines that print a few hundred pages a month need very little. Those that print in the thousands are the ones a plan pays for.

Booking so the visit lands before the rush

The best time for a service visit is the week before the machine is about to be asked for more. Ring when you know the date of the peak, not when it arrives. We would rather fit the visit into a quiet Wednesday than be asked to rescue a machine on the Friday of a deadline.

When you phone, a few details make the call quicker. None of them has to be exact.

• The make and model printed on the front.
• Roughly how many pages it prints in a month.
• Whether it prints in colour, and how much.
• Which finisher or extra trays are fitted.
• Anything it has been doing lately: a squeal, a streak, a message on the panel.
• Whether it is owned or leased.
• Who will meet the technician, and where the machine sits.

Meter reads for offices with more than one machine

Once an office has three or four machines, nobody can say with confidence which of them does the most work. A set of meter reads taken on a regular basis answers that, and it tends to change decisions. The old copier on the second floor turns out to handle a third of the building's pages. The new one in the corner barely gets used. The colour printer everybody complains about is producing a tenth of the colour pages anyone assumed.

We can record the reads and report them back. Ask when you phone, and say how many machines are involved and where they sit.

A leased machine, someone else's contract

Plenty of machines on the coast are under a lease or a rental, and the paperwork often says who may open the machine and who must be told. Read it first. Tell us what the agreement says on the phone, and we say plainly what is ours to do and what the lessor expects to handle. If the machine is yours outright, there is nothing to check.

After a storm

Summer storm season on the coast is hard on office equipment. A power surge, a brownout that lasts a second, or a building that loses power for an hour and then brings everything back at once can leave a copier frozen on a panel message or half way through a job. Nine times in ten a clean restart from the wall socket sorts it.

The tenth time is a machine that now has a fault history it did not have before, usually a power supply or a board. If the same message returns after a restart, stop trying and phone, because repeated power cycling can make a settled fault worse. Tell us what was on the panel and what happened to the building's power, and we can often say what to expect before the technician arrives.

Printers on the same visit

Offices that call us for a copier often have two or three workgroup printers that nobody has looked at since they were installed. If we are on site anyway, we will check them: rollers, fuser, toner levels and the settings that decide which machine takes which job. It is usually a few minutes each, and it saves a separate call later. Mention them when you book.

Habits that spare you a call

Wrap the paper and keep it flat. Keep it off outside walls and out of cupboards that share a wall with a bathroom or a kitchenette. Leave a hand's width of air around the machine and keep it out of the afternoon sun through a west facing window, which on a glass fronted Surfers Paradise floor is a real problem.

Clean the platen glass with a soft dry cloth now and then. Plug the machine directly into a wall socket, not a cheap power board, and switch it off with its own power key rather than at the wall. After a storm, one restart straight from the wall socket is worth trying before you ring.

Do not stack things on top of the machine and do not feed originals with staples still in them. Those two alone cause more feeder visits than we would like.

Signs that a visit is due

Faint lines that were not there last month. Toner that rubs off with a thumb. A feeder that has started to take two sheets. A new squeal or rattle. A longer warm up. A maintenance message on the panel that has appeared twice in a fortnight. Each is the machine telling you something is wearing, and a visit while it still works costs less than a repair after it has failed, because a worn part damages the parts beside it.

Our fault guides cover what each symptom usually points to, and what is safe for office staff to check first.

Coomera to Coolangatta, and across the border

We service machines through Coomera, Helensvale, Nerang, Southport, Bundall, Surfers Paradise, Broadbeach, Robina, Varsity Lakes, Burleigh Heads and Coolangatta, and over the border at Tweed Heads, Kingscliff and Murwillumbah, with Byron Bay, Ballina and Lismore on longer runs. Each area has its own page describing what we find there. Longer jobs are planned into the day, and where we have several machines in one area we group them into one visit.

Repairs happen at your premises. Nothing is posted off, and the machine stays where your staff expect to find it. Our technicians are trained, experienced and certified, they carry the common spare parts, and 98% of repairs are fixed on the first visit. If the same fault comes back, we fix it again at no charge.

When a machine has had its day

Not every copier is worth another visit. One that is out of production, with several worn assemblies and a long fault history, is a poor bet, and we say so. We then lay out the options, which can include a refurbished machine, a new one, or hire. If you decide to replace it, we can also take the old one off your hands.

Ring (07) 3096 0331 or use the contact form to book a service. The price is agreed on the phone before anyone is booked. If the lines are busy the call is logged and returned.

Keep reading

Photocopier repairsAny make of office copier, repaired where it stands.→Commercial printer repairsWorkgroup lasers and fleets, repaired where they sit.→Brands we repairPick your make for models, codes and how we work.→Is my copier worth repairing?Repair or replace, and how we decide.→Copier and printer faultsPick the symptom, get the next step.→Installation and setupPlaced, connected, set up for scanning and tested from the desks that will use it.→Relocation and removalWe move copiers and office printers between suburbs and floors, reconnect them and test them, and remove the ones you no longer need.→