Does anyone own a Ring (or similar) smart doorbell?

We had been considering it for some time, especially as we have a really large garden, so would never hear the front door bell outside of the house. But they are quite expensive.

Last month's Amazon Prime day they had the Ring range on offer, because Amazon own them. So we ended up getting 1.. well actually 2. They have a new one in the Ring range that's far cheaper, called the Ring Doorbell wired. It doesn't have a battery and you need to wire it up to the electric. The main selling idea is to use it if you have an existing mains electric doorbell system, to use the existing wiring, but you don't need to do that. I did some research and for £15 you can buy a power adapter designed for doorbell power. It's basically a plugin 32V transformer with a long length of wire ending in 2 coated wire ends ready to screw down at the doorbell terminals. Works perfectly. Just need to plan the route for the cable from a plug socket to wherever you are mounting the bell.

My mother-in-law is house bound and relies on a door bell camera to see who is there. She was currently using a cheaper unknown brand with a large chunky AA battery powered doorbell and it's own portable screen monitor. It sort of worked ok but eat batteries (6 at a time). Amazon were offered Ring doorbell bundled, where for £10 more you got an Amazon Show 5, which is ideal for displaying who's at the door. And in the prime sale the wired Ring was only £40.

I first setup my mother-in-law bell as it was fairly straight forward. She already had an electronic door release, so I just followed the wiring and used the same wire clips. Needed to replace a single plug socket with a double to plug the power supply in. That took the longest. For the bell just had to drill a hole for the wiring, screw it on and set it up. Works perfectly for her with the Show 5.

For my house I powered up and setup the Ring first before installing it, just to make sure it all worked. My install was a bit more fiddly because the bell is fitted onto a upvc porch, so had to route the cabling along the windows and decided to power it from the garage as its right by the porch, and removed needing to have something else plugged into the hallway. I'm also currently redoing how my broadband router connects to the house ethernet network. Currently the router goes into a switch in the hall, then lots of ethernet cables go into wall sockets going to each room, so a bit of a mess. I'm moving the switch and all cabling the other side of the wall in the garage, then will just have a single ethernet cable from the route in the hall connected to a socket in the wall, that just runs to the other side and into the switch. Much neater. It means I'm adding more plug sockets on the garage wall side, so one extra for the doorbell will keep it out of the way.

Anyway, all setup, and for £40, if you have a power socket near by its great value for money compared to the much more expensive Ring Pros, and no need to charge it.

I'm impressed with the notifications too. They recently added zones to the software so you can mark sections of the camera image where it won't trigger an alert. And all activity is now logged in a timeline, looking very much like a video edit program, so you can just scroll through the day and watch the activity. And taliking to someone is very clear with minimal lag.

We've put the Show5 we got with it down in the Log cabin studio so anyone down there can answer the door without needing a phone.

Only issue now is my wife. At work she gets an alert showing when I'm leaving and returning. So she can spy on me all day. Hmm.