What's actually going on
Copiers do not fail suddenly. Yield falls, jam rates climb and parts costs rise as the device passes its designed duty life, and the tipping point is usually reached long before the machine stops working.
The question is never whether the repair works. It is whether the repair buys enough remaining life to be worth its cost.
What to do in the next 48 hours
- 1Pull your lifetime meter and compare it with the machine's rated duty cycle. Past 80 percent, you are in replacement territory.
- 2Add the last twelve months of service invoices. If they exceed a third of a replacement machine's annual cost, the math has already flipped.
- 3Count downtime hours, not just repair dollars. An office that stops for four hours twice a month is paying more in labour than in parts.
- 4Get a replacement quote before approving a repair over about a thousand dollars, so you are choosing rather than reacting.
The honest tradeoffs
- Repairing keeps capital free and avoids a new term commitment, but on a high-mileage machine you are buying months, not years.
- Replacing resets reliability and cost per page, but starts a new agreement — make sure the old one is properly closed out first.
Your next step
Questions people ask next
- How long should an office copier last?
- A well-maintained mid-volume office copier typically lasts five to seven years, or until it approaches its rated lifetime duty cycle. High-volume production devices are rated in millions of impressions rather than years.
- When is a copier repair not worth it?
- When the repair cost exceeds roughly one year of the replacement machine's total cost of operation, when the device is past 80 percent of its rated lifetime duty cycle, or when the same subsystem has failed more than twice in twelve months.
More on a machine that keeps breaking
- My copier keeps jamming and I've stopped trusting it
- My service company doesn't show up
- My Xerox is showing an error code. What does it mean?
- How much should copier service actually cost?
- Why does my copier put lines or streaks on every page?
- My copier jams every single day
- Xerox error 016-799: what it means and how to fix it
- Xerox error 016-798: what it means and how to fix it
- Xerox error 016-500: what it means and how to fix it
- Xerox error 010-330: what it means and how to fix it
- Xerox error 042-325: what it means and how to fix it
- Xerox error 077-900: what it means and how to fix it
- Xerox error 093-912: what it means and how to fix it
- Xerox error 005-121: what it means and how to fix it
- Xerox error 024-747: what it means and how to fix it
- Xerox error 091-311: what it means and how to fix it
- My copier lease is ending and I don't know what to do
- My lease auto-renewed and I never agreed to it
- I have to return a copier and I don't know the rules