Wash Gear compatability with other cc equipment

[Creole]

Hello All,
Some of you may remember, we purchased an existing wash almost 2 years ago. All is well and we underwent a major project last summer of moving the office to an external building. This summer's project will be to make a change to one of the bays which currently only accepts credit cards. All of our bays accept coins, cash and credit using the card works system from wash gear with the exception of one bay which only accepts credit cards with a card mate II controller. We would like to make this bay like the rest, however it appears to be more expensive to stay with wash gear equipment. The short question is this.......will a pre-packaged meter box with coin, bill and credit card reader from cryptopay, usa wireless, hamilton ect, interface with the wash gear system?

Thanks,
Terry

 

[MEP001]

Cryptopay is its own system and doesn't interface with anything else but the Cryptopay coordinator and the timer.

 

[Creole]

I was afraid that would be the case, it would be too easy if there was an industry standard for all the systems and the interface language or protocol. LOL It is possible to duplicate the other bay controllers for the new one with card works, it just happens to be more expensive, but in the big picture of things, not as expensive as a complete change out to get an entirely new system. Thanks for the reply and information. Now, I wonder if it's possible to find used Card Works Gear?

 

[JustClean]

Just a thing to remember before making a major expenditure:
Many card readers in the US are obsolete and will be faded out sooner rather than later. The manufacturers won't tell you as they want to sell their old stock. New equipment should be PCI/EMV compliant.

 

[MEP001]

It will probably be a while before the chip/PIN cards completely replace the swipers.

 

[Creole]

It looks like I'm going to have to build a custom box to match what's in the other bays. A source for used Wash Gear controllers and readers would be nice, but after scouring the web it seems nearly impossible to find. It would also be nice to know if I can retrofit the existing card Mate II equipment to simply add a bill acceptor and coin mechanism. I think I could gut the existing control box and use most of it to make my custom box but I would just have to re purchase one to install at the vacuum bay. Any body know the difference between the AE and SE card readers from Wash Gear?

 

[soapy]

You can buy any coin box with coin and bill acceptors. You can mount a wash gear swipe reader on the face plate or add the wash gear box with CC swipe reader next to the new coin box. All that happens with any CC system is once the card is swiped and approved the CC system sends a signal to the selector switch to energize it. 2 wires run to the selector switch from CC system. I personally would go with the wash gear box and reader that has the digital display. In my experience the customer prefers to be able to read the CC display. My sales are much higher with the digital display vs. a system that just has the CC swipe reader with no display.

 

[Starcarwash]

Hi. Just wondering what you ended up doing to solve your issue. I just bought a wash in may and my auto cashier card reader went down and it's hard to swallow the 2k investment on a card reader.