I’m toying with the idea of getting a Ring doorbell as I quite like the tech but I am wondering if it is a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. Has anyone got one and, if so, why? Interested in real world experience.

Thanks

Not got one but been looking into a lot as if we end up moving soon (hopefully!) I am gonna go down the whole home automation route big time. Ring is regarded as the easy plug n play option but otherwise a bit shit. As to the concept in general, yes how often does someone actually ring your door bell? Once in a blue moon for me really these days. But as a gadgety thing to mess around with it’s a cool idea.

As we’ve been home more, we’ve noticed that it must be more than 80% knock on the door rather than ring the doorbell.

How dependant on someone pressing the button, is the functionality? Would someone knocking on the door be close enough to set off an alert? If so, I assume the “conversation” can be triggered from your phone.

I have the pro one fitted which needs a power supply rather than battery. The video quality is very good and is fine as a door bell – however answering the call via a phone is very poor. Always seems to complain of poor network and by the time it’s connected the person’s gone anyway.

Good as a “check what happened” or “did the amazon guy leave that parcel or take it away?” type thing.

I hear the battery versions are slower as they connect to wifi when they need to rather than staying connected. I think due to the size they must have a very poor antenna is wifi strength is always complained about.. even when close to the router.

You also need to factor in a small subscription if you want to be able to record and play back video..

Jeff

We bought one in response to someone pinching our milk from the doorstep in the night.

It works wells for our property as the camera position being doorbell height and the location of our front door being central to the face of the property, means the camera covers the whole front of the house. There is no other direct access except from the front. The field of detection can be adjusted which stops it recording too much passing traffic.

The most ‘interesting’ thing it has captured is some random bloke walking right on to our drive having a nosey and walking off. Pre-lockdown, it’s practical use was as an intercom to tell delivery drivers where to safely leave parcels.

It’s fit and forget-ish (battery lasts about 3 months), app works pretty well and provides some sense of security (a sense which it appears we don’t particularly need).

How dependant on someone pressing the button, is the functionality? Would someone knocking on the door be close enough to set off an alert? If so, I assume the “conversation” can be triggered from your phone

You can set them to chime even without a button press. They are very sensitive.. Ours detects people walking down the drive 15m away and the zones can be changed to stop false alerts. It records whenever there is movement to you can see and hear what happens at the door, even if they ignore it and knock.

Which is quite amusing when the JW’s stand looking at it suspiciously talking to each other about whether it’s a smart doorbell…

Jeff

@onzadog don’t know about Ring but certainly some of the other systems I’ve been looking into can be setup to work that way, using image recognition so you get an alert when someone approaches the door

It’s not doorbell dependant, it’s motion activated. It will notify first of motion and then if someone has actually rung the doorbell.

App connectivity is very much dependant on strength/stability of WiFi connection. We bought the range boosting Chime to ensure this works well.

Can be a delay on them – I can go indoors and upstairs before the phone buzzes to tell me I ‘m at my front door. Delay seems to get worse as battery power decreases, but even at 100% it can be 30 seconds. Can be over a minute at times, by which point most cllers have given up and moved away

I got the Nest Hello as I have a Nest Thermostat and didn’t want multiple apps for many devices.

Is there any point? Well yes and is a solution to a problem you didn’t realise existed and were just putting up with before. but wether its of any value to you is another thing.

The main point is that you can interact with people at the door when you’re away from the house…useful when out of lockdown and returned to the office or something. Also acts like a CCTV which you can access any time and notifies you if it detects motion or hears a noise, so you can actually have a pro-active security measure rather than a dumb one that only alerts you after the burglar has run off with your possessions. Also you can use it as an intercom and shout stuff at people passing by the house if that sort of thing makes you chuckle. You can also record messages so if someone rings the bell you can have a message should you wish.

If you subscribe to the service (I haven’t) you get more interactive control over reviewing footage stored into the cloud, you can use face recognition so it alerts you to who has rang the doorbell and other features to.

Go on…its a smart device for the modern smart connected world we live in where people work during the day when delivery people want to come and deliver stuff you’re ordered because you’re too busy to go to actual shops to buy stuff.

The annoying thing is that now whenever a delivery person comes to the door they no longer ring the doorbell and knock on the door. they clearly don’t want to interact with the doorbell so when they knock on the door at 7am I still have to get out of bed, put some pants on and go answer the door instead of telling them to leave the package down the side of the house.

I sent it back for a refund. For some reason it was slow to respond – by the time the app woke up and started an alert the delivery bloke would be back in his van halfway down the road, although the motion sensor worked ok, provided I was sat at the PC at the time.

Then there was their subscription model. Despite paying £££ for the unit, they wanted extra cash so you could see who you’d just missed because their app was so slow to wake up. I had naively assumed that clips would be saveable to SD or PC, rather than still be the property of Ring Inc.

I’m going to get a three pack of blink XT2 or whatever the latest incarnation is and see how I get on with those. If not much kop, I’ll go for a Nest camera system

Nope, bad idea, very bad idea. Today it lets you look who is at your front door. Tomorrow it’s used to prove you weren’t at home for an extended period and invalidate your insurance. The footage could be used to prove you left the door unlocked. It could prove you’re associated with criminals whether you know they are or not by using face recognition to see who visits. That will then lead to your own privacy being invaded as the police start watching you on the off chance you commit a crime.
Are you planning to pay more to store your videos than the insurance company will pay for access to them?
Being in the tech industry I regularly see how the data collected by these devices is abused so video systems and voice assistants are not allowed anywhere near my home and I ask people to swich them off when I’m in other places. Amazon and Google have zero interest in your wellbeing and 100% interest in your data and selling advertising to take advantage of you.

still be the property of Ring Inc.

You mean Amazon.

@lustyd – paranoid much?

Stop dealing weed from home 😂

Surely the bellboy takes care of that malarkey.

I have a chinesium copy which works pretty well.
It has a separate chime which is handy.

It’s best use so far was when DHL delivered some heavy shelving units the other day whilst I was having a poo. I was able to instruct him to take them down the side of the house if he didn’t want to wait the five minutes or so that I would of take to get to the door 😉

£100+ for a doorbell? Ha ha, nope.

I have one. I agree with all the experiences above. I thought it was just me with the lag in getting it to go live even after I invested in a better wi-fi router last week because it seemed to have a poor signal.
Getting it to pair initially involved an awful lot of swearing, and the chime was the same.
I can live with the fact that I no longer see the recordings and I now set the motion detector to alert me on those occasions when I’m expecting a delivery or visit which gives me time to get down from the workshop before they’ve buggered off.

Whilst I can see the practical value, if your delivery guys just ignore it anyway then its of limited use.

It’s best use so far was when DHL delivered some heavy shelving units the other day whilst I was having a poo. I was able to instruct him to take them down the side of the house

I hope there was a gratuitous background of splashes and squirts for added emphasis.

Being in the tech industry I regularly see how the data collected by these devices is abused so video systems and voice assistants are not allowed anywhere near my home and I ask people to swich them off when I’m in other places. Amazon and Google have zero interest in your wellbeing and 100% interest in your data and selling advertising to take advantage of you.

I definitely trust Apple more than Amazon/Google when it comes to data, however there’s open source options now for most things, including a voice assistant that you can run on your own server i.e. no cloud/3rd party involvement at all. Been meaning to check it out!

Had ours for years, one of the original battery ones and it’s good. We don’t have any issues with people not using it. Very useful for dealing with deliveries when away from the house and wife has health issues that can prevent her from getting to the door, so she relies on it.

I have a few cams too, out the back covering where the bikes and tools are kept.

I’m pretty sure the battery ones wake as soon as they see movement, so by the time the bell is pushed and you have a look on your phone it’s ready, so in theory, it shouldn’t be slower? I have noticed the iPhone app seems less reliable connecting than my Android one though.

Also, being Amazon, it integrates with Echo. I can get an image up on any Echo/TV of any of the cameras (not that I do it very often!)

It’s not for me.

My mate wired (well wirelessly) up his house with smart cameras, door sensors and smart lighting etc. Just made a slightly paranoid person worse.

CCTV already has a way of making the innocent look criminal and I can’t imagine many couriers happy to leave stuff laying about without a signature just because a voice told then too.

My lad has found the best use for his is checking that all the kids are home from school together when he and wife are both working. Obvs before this C19 BS !!

If you can get past the guard swans then you’re welcome to nick my milk or leave a delivery.

They can break your arm, you know?

@theArtist it’s not paranoia when you’re part of the industry and see the abuse and how it’s achieved. I’ve also seen systems which raise prices on websites for Mac users because they’re more wealthy. Try having a spoken conversation about a product you’ve never looked up and would never buy. You’ll see ads within hours if you’re running apps such as Facebook messenger.

Try having a spoken conversation about a product you’ve never looked up and would never buy. You’ll see ads within hours if you’re running apps such as Facebook

I’m well aware of this. If anyone is that interested in my little life they are welcome to look in. If they don’t get it one way, they’ll get it another, I’m not that bothered. Are you typing this on Nokia

I’ll admit that I haven’t read the whole thread.
I am in the security industry.
The domestic market for professionals is dead.
All domestic want is cheap/ wireless and anybody can do it.

Price wins over professionalism.

I might be on site for hours going through risk assessments etc in the correct way taking measurements of correct lens mm etc then they go to someone cheaper that uses my assessments! It doesn’t’ work, they go to another company to fx it to save embarrassment of accepting that I was the better option.

I don’t like Yale/ Ring and the like because they don’t comply to regs and are DIY systems.

But we have to accept that this is what people want.

I won’t have anything to do with it though.

Tomorrow it’s used to prove you weren’t at home for an extended period and invalidate your insurance.

😂

Well if you were away from home for an extended period you are not insured. If you like to indulge in a bit of fraud from time to time then I can see how things like this don’t appeal to you.

‘They’ already know about us. Every time you use a card in a shop, have your mobile with you, draw cash out of an ATM, use a phone system, go on the internet etc. They’ve got all the data on you they need already. A camera on a doorbell is not really going to add to the data set they have on you. And even if that is a concern for you (I am sympathetic to the data mining issue) its a balance of risks. Balancing the risk of giving up little more private data Vs the convenience the device brings and the additional security.

As to the issue of ‘professionalism’, while I’m sure Donkeysled is a consummate professional of the highest order unfortunately a lot are not. Maybe if more ‘professionals’ conducted themselves in a more professional manner and did professional quality jobs then maybe the public’s opinion of professionals wouldn’t be so low and wouldn’t dread having to use them and opt for the DIY route of modern Wi-fi devices.

But I’d take issue that some of these devices are not good. In a lot of cases they are devices the professionals themselves recommend. When I got my Nest thermostat I looked to getting it professionally fitted, but quotes ranged from £80 to £180 for a job I knew was quite simple – £80 was reasonable but couldn’t get anyone interested in doing the job. Ended up doing it myself. Of course took a lot longer than it would have if a pro did it, but as I went along I corrected dodgy stuff previous professionals did before and spent a bit of time making things nice and neat and tidy, which most pro’s wouldn’t do….or if they did would charge you extra.

I really like mine and we get a lot of value from it. We also have the remote chime so can hear it anywhere in the house, where previously we wouldn’t. Connecting via wifi can be a bit slow but the rapid ring app helps. Battery needs changing every 6 weeks on ours but it’s not so much of a chore. On balance id give it 7/10. Would be a lot higher if the connection was faster and more stable.

psa for those finding the ring app slow to connect to the camera – download “rapid ring” – it’s a cut-down version and much faster – ios and android i believe

I’ve got rapid ring installed on my phone but it doesn’t seem to work, all the notifications come through the main app

I’ve got rapid ring installed on my phone but it doesn’t seem to work, all the notifications come through the main app

if ios go into settings-notifications and turn notifications off for ring app and on for rapid ring – don’t know android but suspect similar 😉

Android doesn;t work like that – can only choose to stop notifications appearing for specific apps via the settings menu.

If I turn off notifications in the main Ring app, then i don’t get any notifications. 🙁

So overall people seem to be a bit unimpressed about it. I think I’ll give it a swerve. Cheers

download “rapid ring” – it’s a cut-down version and much faster

Tried this, didn’t improve things much. Plus, mysteriously, it got even slower when my trial subscription to their ‘Protect’ plan ended…

Anyhow, it’s a bad sign when a company has to release a separate app to try to improve poor functionality of their core app!

AFAIK the phone app always connects to the Ring servers, even if answering the door. The doorbell pushes video and notifications up to there. So your Broadband performance may come into play, especially if you have poor upload speeds.

I’ve almost bought a Ring (and some other variants) a few times (and am generally happy to waste money on tech of questionable value…) but it’s the amount of people complaining about notification delays and video lag that puts me off. I already have CCTV so don’t need it for that but even if I did I don’t think the huge compromise for it’s primary function (being a door bell) would be worth it. Same with interacting with delivery people, useful but not enough I’d want the frustration of the notification delay.

So your Broadband performance may come into play, especially if you have poor upload speeds.

Don’t think that’s it in my case – full fat fibre with fast ping, router about five feet from the Ring device.

The need to go chat to a server before that tries to wake up your phone sounds like it has more potential for introducing delays.

Don’t know if my failure to keep giving them money after the trial period was the reason why it got even slower at that point (it’s possible the battery need a charge, I suppose) 🙂 Amazon were very good about giving me my money back though, even two months later.