It’s funny that I’ve been using Ring products since 2021 when I put in the alarm system (and then moved to all Ring cameras in 2025) but still did not have Ring’s original product: the doorbell.
I guess timing is everything … during Amazon’s Prime Days event last month I noticed our everyday normal doorbell was coming out of the wall (bad grip into some crumbling cement for the lower screw) and the light had burned out. It still worked but since Amazon had their 2nd generation Ring Battery Doorbell on sale for $50, well …
The reason I had not purchased a Ring doorbell before now was primarily due to power requirements. I didn’t want to deal with having to pop the doorbell off the wall every few weeks (or however long the battery would last) to charge. I can’t explain why this bugged me since I have some indoor Ring cameras that run on batteries that need to be charged, I guess it’s just an indoor/outdoor thing. Anyway, Ring’s previous generations’ power requirements were too much for my existing doorbell’s transformer (an old NuTone 5VA/10V one) and (again, I can’t explain why, but) I didn’t want to replace it. Doing some quick research on the 2nd gen battery doorbell seemed to indicate it would work with “8 to 24 VAC and 5VA to 40VA” and existing chimes, so I decided to give it a shot.
Installation wasn’t too bad. I did have to drill a new lower hole into the concrete wall for the bracket (an easy job for my hammer drill) and the existing doorbell wires were a little short (which made connecting them to the Ring’s terminals a little challenging), but overall the whole process took just under an hour and most of that was me going back and forth into the garage to get tools, or measuring, or whatever. The good news was that with the Ring doorbell attached to the old wiring, it reported itself in the app as being “hardwired.” Our doorbell is not on the same wall as the entry door but at a 90-degree angle to it so I used the Ring corner kit to get it at a 20-degree angle away from the wall.
Before physically installing the doorbell I had added it to the Ring app but now that it was up and running I went back into the app to tweak the settings. The first thing I did was turn off the doorbell’s built-in digital chime and enabled my existing physical chimes. So now when someone “rings” the doorbell, we get the familiar “ding dong” indoors and there’s no sound from the Ring outside (the blue LED ring still spins though to let the person know it’s active).
It’s been a few weeks now since the install and I’m pretty happy with the doorbell. The 2K video quality is very good and interacting with it in the Ring app is just like all of my other cameras (setting up motion zones, alerts, etc.). I’ll never use some of the additional features like smart reponses, quick replies, or having Alexa take messages though. The face recognition is a little creepy, but I do like that it can recognize me and not bother to send a motion alert.
I noticed today while writing this that the battery level is down to 93% so I still might need to charge it at some point. That will be a little more involved since I have it connected to the wiring which means I’ll have to either completely disconnect it (and like I mentioned, the wires are short so it’s a bit of a challenge getting them connected to the terminals) or see if maybe I can just connect a battery pack with a long USB-C cord. I’ll figure that out when/if I need to.