Ring Video Doorbell

youngsyp

Hi all,

After a lot of reading, I've just taken the plunge on a Ring Video Doorbell and wondered if anyone had any words of wisdom/ experiences to share?
The plan is to hard wire it for power, main so I can use the 'live' video but, initially it will be running of the internal battery alone.
I also bought the Ring Chime to go with it which arrived yesterday. Was a bit of a faff to set up. I initially tried to do so with my Android phone but it kept complaining the set up didn't finish. I'm fairly proficient with IP networking so I was scratching my head with the advice the 'help' was giving. My LAN/ WLAN set up isn't exactly 'out the box' though which had me second guessing. Then I tried with the Windows 10 app and the first few tries it too appeared to reject the set up. When actually watching the Chime though, it seemed to set up perfectly. So I closed the app, relaunched it and the Chime was now added to 'My devices'. Odd! I just hope the doorbell doesn't have a similar flaky set up wizard.

Paul

noelebob

Very interested to see how you get on, some of the negative reviews are putting me off, but they may well be user error.

Scubapauly

I'm interested too. They now have a Pro version available via the US website. No UK distributor plans yet though
The pro must be hard wired as it's a smaller unit without the battery. Does say it give improved video at 1080p and allow you to custom shape the active areas.

eddiewww

I was just going to post on this very unit!

What i need to go along with this is a "smart lock"? I'm moving soon and the lounge will be on the 3rd floor, with the entrance on the ground floor, so ideally i would like to see who is at the door and hit the "enter" button on my phone/tablet and let whoever it is in if needed, like a door entry handset thing in flats.

Is anybody using this or just as a souped up doorbell?

Scubapauly

It's just a doorbell

youngsyp

Ordered the Ring from Amazon last week and it arrived the next day. Much easier to set up than the Chime and when I chose to re-set up the Chime after the doorbell install, that seemed to work better too.
After some patchy connectivity performance, I chose to set up a guest SSID for the Ring kit to sit on. Initially I chose to hide the SSID but that seemed to cause connectivity issues so the guest SSID is now broadcast and it now functions as expected.
The doorbell is connected to the router at a rate of 24Mb/s with the link quality being around 78% (due to close proximity). So the bandwidth poses no problems for a 300N connection. My ADSL is very low latency too (around 13ms round trip to the beeb) so that should help with performance. It does appear that the achilles heal is my upload throughput. I'm on an annex A ADSL2  service so sync at around 1019kb/s up with throughput of around 870kb/s up. That's on the cusp of being able to support the video stream and of course will dip below being able to support the Ring if anything else is using the connection. This I believe is the crux of the majority of the negative reviews out there.

Other than that, the IR motion sensing is very sensitive at full range, easily picking up movement at 30ft plus at extreme angles to the doorbell. But fine tuning the sensitivity is certainly tricky.
I plan on hard wiring in the doorbell more as an experiment that anything else. When not in use the doorbell goes to sleep. So when the button is pressed or it's motion activated, it needs to wake up and re-connect to the WLAN every time. This is a battery saving feature and probably another one of the reasons why feedback mentions slow notification of events so much. If the device is hardwired, my hope is that it stays connected. I can't find any information either way.

After my initial experiences, these are the things I think you should consider before buying one and I think you'll notice a trend:

Your broadband should offer an upload rate of 1.5Mb/s or more.
Your broadband should offer low latency.
Your gateway/ router/ AP should be within very close proximity to the doorbell (mine's less than 4 feet).
You should give each device a static IP address.
You should have at least a basic understanding of (and appreciation of issues inherent with) wireless IP networks.

To summarise, I was acutely aware of the probable broadband issue before I pulled the trigger but hoped I'd be OK. Although my results so far have been patchy, I can attribute them all to how I was using my broadband connection at the time. So I'm not disappointed I bought the thing but am looking forward to the day I can sign up to a fibre connection that will allow it to work as it's designed too. In the mean time, I'll experiment to see if I can improve the performance with different configurations.

If you have any questions, please shout.

Paul

youngsyp

The Ring supports IFTTT and interaction with 'smart' locks is specifically mentioned in a lot of their media bumpf.

Paul

youngsyp

the Pro version supports PoE too I believe so you only need to run a cat5e/ cat6 cable to it. The 'regular' 720p version supports customisation of the active area too.
It's worth noting that the Pro will also use a lot of upload bandwidth. I believe Ring recommend 2Mb/s but I'd want to give it access to more than that from my experiences. If you have fibre broadband though, that won't be an issue.

Paul

noelebob

Thanks for the write up Paul.

Lots to consider. What is your experience if any of receiving and answering a call at the door when you are not on the home wifi network?

youngsyp

Reading it back, it was more of a brain fart than a write up. But hopefully it was useful nonetheless.

The experience (thus far) of receiving notifications and viewing the 'calls' was essentially the same over cellular (strong 3G/ middling 4G) or WiFi. Notifications come up within a second or so. and once the app opens, the video takes a good few seconds to appear. Again, I put the last part down to my upload bandwidth and of course, how good your viewing devices connectivity is will also impact the experience.
It's also worth stating that you can start talking as soon as the app is open, even if the video takes seconds more to appear. Good for stalling for time, waiting for the video to appear.

I don't typically connect my phone to the home network unless I'm doing something specific. So for all intents and purposes, the experience I get is as if I'm anywhere in the world. It's quite amusing of you have numerous devices with the app installed though. It's quite a racket when they all go off at once.

Paul