Apologies in advance for the extreme dullness of the post.
The builder finished in my garage yesterday. He’s built me a WFH office out there. I’m going to move my computer from my dining table to the garage office in the next few weeks (when I’ve decorated). I (will) have a wired Ethernet connection from router to garage. Router is behind the front door.
I get quite a few parcels which don’t fit through the letter box (i.e. 12″ vinly, weekly veg box, eggs in trays). Mrs F now goes into the office 2-5 days a week.
I think I need a camera/intercom doorbell thingy and something to allow me to see who’s at the door and tell them I’m on my way.
Please, the Massive, tell me what to buy, so I don’t have to think too hard about it. I have enough to do with painting doors, frames and skirting boards.
P.S. The dodgers have an Alexa device sale on at the moment.
(Read in monotone). I tried a well-reviewed but cheaper alternative to a Ring (Eufy) and although it worked great if someone actually pressed the doorbell, the motion sensing barely worked at all and their support couldn’t sort it.
I switched to a Ring Video Doorbell 4 (comes with an internal chime) and it’s been faultless over the last 3 months. I had to reposition it slightly as if you put them too close to a side wall, the IR beams reflect back to the unit when it’s dark and screw up the nigh time picture but aside from that it’s been great.
I gather the positioning of the units relative to your wifi is a key issue so you’d need to play around if you need it for a remote office but, as always, buy from somewhere that won’t give you a hard time if you need to replace/return.
Numpty questions:
1. how does the doorbell get power? It will go where the current button bell push is, on the door frame, and there are power and the router on other side of the wall (in the hallway), which is handy.
2. Does it have to connect via WiFi? Our house is 15 years old, constructed with a single layer of brick with 4″ of foil-faced Celotex insulation (covered with plasterboard) inside. The foil does quite a good job of stopping WiFi leaving (or 4G mobile phone signal entering) the house.
I could drill a hole through the door frame and feed an Ethernet cable to the camera thingy.
1. Battery or you can use your existing bell power cable – just check that it doesn’t require an adapter to adjust the voltage. I just bought a spare battery so it doesn’t have to be out of action while it gets charged every 3 or 4 months.
2. Yes, I think they all need WiFi (there may be one that can use ethernet but it’s sort of 2 or 3 times the price of anything else)
Thanks.
It seems like I still need to do a bit of reading – I prefer Henry Ford levels of selection.
I’m waiting for one well-known poster to say, “Doorbells! People still have them? How quaint! English people are so weird….” etc
Never mind doorbells … letterboxes in yer actual front door! Most of world is like whaaat?
And why are they never 13″ wide, to allow delivery of black magic?
That’s a big box of chocolates
Nowdays, of course, Da Yoof have their magic delivered on coloured – or, even worse, splatter (aka “vomit”) – vinly.
Other Atlantic Soul compilations are available
Assuming that your garage is accessible from the same place that the front door is ( highly likely unless the Fenton estate is a sprawling Surrey mansion complex), why not have a little sign saying ‘All deliveries to the garage, please’?
I should have said: I’ve blocked up behind the up-and-over garage doors which face the road. To enter the garage I have to go out of the house (kitchen, or front door and side gate), up the path between house and garage, and in the 2’6″ garage back door (which faces the back garden). To get to the office (at the front, behind an u-&-o door), I have to walk through the soundproofed room in the middle.
To answer the front door, I have to do all that in reverse. It’s going to take a while. I need to be able to communicate “I’ll be there in a minute.”
“To answer the front door, I have to do all that in reverse.”
That sounds hazardous.
We got this smart doorbell from Wuuk about a year or two ago via one of those Indiegogo type startup campaigns. Aside from some initial delays in them delivering to their timeline, it’s been faultless.
https://www.wuuklabs.com/
It does the usual things of detecting movement and recording (last two days are kept in the cloud for free, you can add a SD card to keep for longer) and also has an intercom to talk to whoever presses the doorbell all for your phone. Suits our needs and has saved us quite a few missed deliveries where we have told them where to leave instead of them leaving a card etc…
Why not hire a Footman and place him by the front door, a Mr Rees Mogg writes.
Fortnum and Mason will leave your quail’s eggs with cook.
“All deliveries via the Tradesman’s Entrance”…
…Moose?
You have to open the garden gates first
Good idea. I’ll instruct Nanny to dictate a recruitment advertisment to the editor of the Telegraph.
Knockers – I prefer knockers
Yes but what about the OP?
I believe (from what I read on Mozilla’s security check pages) that kept on their “out of the box” settings they are suspect to hackers… er. hacking stuff.
Wifi doorbells? We’ll have no wifi doorbells here!
We just bought an old front door for the house we’re doing up (burglars only needed to breathe on the old one and it would open) and it came with one of those old-school clockwork bells where you turn a small knob and the bell rings on the other side of the door. Sounds like a bicycle bell. I am enchanted with this, and I’ve been doing a Repair Shop job on it – taken it apart and cleaned everything, got the rust off (tinfoil and salt water, who knew), put it back together, and it works like a dream. All I’ll have to do when we finally move in (some months yet) is train delivery drivers to use it.
Any delivery instructions? “Yes, Pull my knob”
AW Peeps.
If we were all to stop buying so much “stuff”, we wouldn’t need smart doorbells etc.
Then we’d be able to donate large quantities of cash to our saintly mods and make our website as amazeballs as this one.
.
https://www.lingscars.com/
Saw an interesting FB post from a friend last week (can’t find it now to show you) about how their Ring doorbell kept waking them up at night saying someone was at their door.
Turned out their “visitor” was a small spider crawling over the camera lens.
“Knock knock
Knock knock
Knock knock
Knock knock”
“Who’s there?”
“A spider”
KNOCK – knock – knock -knock
KNOCK – knock – knock -knock
KNOCK – knock – knock -knock
Who’s there?
Lee Perry
(That’s the last time I buy those cheap Christmas crackers)
I installed a Eufy for my father in law about a month ago. It was easy to install and works well, including motion detection.
It has a loud ringing unit and also can be installed on a mobile phone and Alexa. We set up all three easily. It is powered by an inbuilt battery that needs charging about twice a year. You remove the doorbell with a supplied key and plug into a USB socket. It can also be used with mains power if you have the wiring from an old door bell.