My neighbor asked me to look at her wireless doorbell, which suddenly stopped working properly. The buttons still work if you move them close to the unit but they no longer work mounted on the outside of the door frame. We've replaced the 3 "D" cells in the base unit and the 12V cells in the two buttons but still no joy.
Any ideas?
-- Bobby G.
Has she or a neighbor added some other new wireless device that is interfering with the doorbell ?? Does the bell have any capability of using a different channel ??
Blame the current sunspot storms. Or a neighbor's giant radio transmitting rig. Or an overpowered badly designed computer peripheral. If the doorbell is important, simply get a dead reliable hard wired unit installed. End of problem.
Joe
12V cells?
-- Bobby G.
"Robert Green" wrote in news:jfsfc7$jo8$ snipped-for-privacy@speranza.aioe.org:
Any Wifi wireless ethernet around? Or a wireless camera somewhere? Look in those kind of culprits. A lot of them are on the same or closeby frequency.
Did you just check the open-circuit voltage, or did you test them under load. I usually put a100 ohm resistor across the battery terminals when I test them, that puts a 10 - 30 ma load on the 1 - 3 V battery which usually is enough to show either good or weak.
under load or open circuit voltage?
bad batteries connected to a digital voltmeter may test fine but still be bad
If the battery of the button (transmitter) is removed or loses contact the bell (receiver) may have to be re-programmed. I don=92t know about your doorbell but I know the brand IQ America does.
Those wireless doorbells are a pain in the ass. I've dealt with several of them. A place I worked has them because the brick building was too hard to run the wires, but as their maintenance guy, I think I had to tinker with at least one of them at least twice a month. There were 3 units, since the building was too large for one receiver and separate buttons. this was in the late 1990s
About 6 years later I bought one for my home, which has aluminum siding. Due to the metal siding, it would not work at all.
They are unreliable and a pain in the ass. If at all possible, put in a wired doorbell.
Till then, check the batteries with an actual battery tester. Clean contacts, and pray...... Also, if it's real cold outdoors, most electronics tend to run poorly, batteries drop in voltage, etc.
(Wow - what causes your reply to come up >> instead of >?)
I just don't see that being a problem here with new batteries that read "hot" and the old batteries that read around 1.4V. It does sound like taping a small resistor to the back of my DVM might be a good idea, though.
So far, my experience with "phantom" voltage hasn't extended to alkaline cells and I go through 100's in a year with digital cameras and pocket voice recorders. Besides, the units work consistently close up - just not at the distances they used to work. I measured the batteries after we rang the chimes dozens of times. They still read OK.
Dead batteries were my first assumption when I heard of the range reduction. I now believe it's some other issue and the next test will involve resetting the chime's operating frequency to attempt to work around any RFI issues.
Thanks for your input!
-- Bobby G.
Brand new batteries in all three buttons - one that came with a replacement button and two that came off carded battery stock that was in date, NIP and tested above nominal voltage.
-- Bobby G.
Who doesn't? (-: A long time ago, while moderating a huge 16 line BBS system in the days before the net, I developed the habit of reading threads from the latest to the oldest just to avoid the problem.
-- Bobby G.
WiFi could easily be the culprit. Will know more this weekend - there's been a medical emergency going on for the last couple of days with her grandchild - and of course, the doorbell goes out to add to the misery.
-- Bobby G.
Change them out agan and put the issue to bed. Not costly nor time consuming & takes out some guesswork.
HTH,
Twayne`
I think that's common, and not cheap.
I'm thinking the sets operate around 400 MHz but doubt if anywhere near wifi. I don't know if there is a frequency adjust, but I would suspect the frequency is off. They are cheap enough to replace the whole thing.
Greg
I spent some time today testing the various frequency setting jumpers with no joy. Put a huge metal pot over the WiFi hotspot with no joy. While the doorbell may not be in the 400MHz range, the harmonics from the hotspot could be strong enough to "step" on the doorbell signal. I've taken home a dead, water damaged button to look at the circuit board.
Occasionally a little piece of wire extending the antenna helps. The WiFi router is unfortunately set up about ten feet away from the doorbell. My neighbor did not want to turn off the router because it's twitchy to restart. In fact, I am going to donate one of my old, flea powered UPS's to her so that it doesn't get locked up when there's a power blip. I think it's the WiFi unit, but I was surprised that putting it under a big metal pot had no effect on the doorbell's range. She has some other wireless gear in the house so RF interference seems likely. I am going to try to figure out the frequency of this unit (no FCC ID that I could see) and then we'll look to buy a unit with a different frequency to see if that works any bette r. As you point out, they're cheap enough that any more hours spent debugging this one would be a waste compared to just getting a new one.
-- Bobby G.
-- Bobby G.
Gioid point, and you said it already. Never mind what I said.
When my remote wouldn't work with my Powerid pyramd IR relay , it turned out the Powermid transmitter in one room, the device I was supposed to aim the remote at, was overloaded..
People told me that the CFL lamps or the incancescent lamps would do that, so I started being more careful to turn lights off in t hat room, and then on the whole floor. But I would wake up in the middle of the night, no sun outside either, to see the red indicator light that said it was receiving IR flashing on and off. I changed to another transmitter and it did the same thing. So I had to disconnect the whole thing. I'm going to try a third transmitter, but there must be some IR or maybe a harmonic of it? somewhere.
So the nexrt step is to put a swtich on the transmitter and turn it off whenever I leave the room. That will probably help me, but not you.
That doesn't prove much. It's just a variation on "inadequate range".
I have a radio in my shop which always worked fine. When I started trying to fix my old computer in the shop, the moitor interfered with the FM reception on the one stattion I listen to, 88.1FM (so I swticherd to internet radio, but there are still times I'd rather just turn on the radio.) Months later I went through a period where the radio worked fine even when the monitor was on. A few days. Then it went back the old way, and turning the monitor on when the computer was running ruined the radio reception. I have no idea yet why sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn/t
Doies the pot have to be grounded? I've never understood this, so I'm not saying it has to be. But there was some reason in the past I began to think that. .
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