Have a wirless door bell that has taken to ringing sometimes by itself (and yes i checked for kids running off).
Makers said battery might be low and would cause this. The door push has a transmitter with a *12volt A23s* battery in it.
Is there any way i could test whether it is any good using an ordinary multimeter? Since i understand just getting a voltage reading is not good enough (that's what they say with car batteries anyway).
Ours goes off occasionally by itself, and the remote key fob for my TVR will reliably set it off...
Measure the voltage with the battery in the bell, if it's much less than 12 volts (i.e. 11 volts or less) then it's ready to be replaced.
Can you test the battery when it is installed, and press the button at the same time? if so, see if the voltage sags significantly when you do this.
Also, the spurious trigger may be nothing to do with the push, it may be picking up a signal from somewhere else - do you have a way to set a channel on the push and receiver, if so, try changing this over.
The current draw from a dry cell like this is so small a DVM will give a reasonable indication of the battery state. Generally. But can you measure it with the button pressed?
A friend got a new wireless doorbell and found that whenever someone pressed to ring the doorbell his automatic garage doors opened!
It was a few weeks before he realised what was happening.
My money would be on something new in the neighbourhood on the same band and encoding if battery swap doesn't fix it.
The advice given about the low battery in the transmitter is likely to be bollocks.#
It's always a good idea to give make and model when posting this kind of question. Is there a coding or pairing procedure in the instructions?
These things will be on the same RF frequency as many others within range, but there is often a digital code that can be changed to make yours unique.
I hate wireless doorbells, my hardwired one has been running for 33 years without any intervention from me.
As others have said, they do that sometimes for no good reason.
We have three receivers in different rooms, sometimes one of them will false alarm when the others stay quiet.
The receiver is looking for some coded signal &, from time to time, noise in that part of the spectrum will look sufficiently signal-like to fool the detector.
If you haven't got a spare battery available, it's probably worth buying one just in case.
Once you one, why not swap the battery to see if it makes a difference?
+1
Older wireless doorbells had 4 tiny switches in the bell push & receiver so you could set the same code on each, modern ones 'apparently' sort themselves out, but reset & start again if you remove the bell push battery for a certain period.
The cheaper ones. I've never known a Friedland do it.
Richard.
Ours couldn't be heard in all parts of the house when masked by usual household noises. The last straw was when the wiring to the bell-push needed replacing.
A wireless doorbell lets us have several 'bells' around the house in convenient places - and they're easy to move if you need to do that.
we even have one to take into the garden
A neighbour has got the same model and is tuned to your receiver. Usually the bell push and receiver can be set to an alternative code.
Get a louder one? Easy with a mains one - not so easy with a wireless one.
You mean you chopped through it? ;-)
Two mains bells cover all of this quite large house easily. And of course is a bell is easily moved, it's just as easily left in the wrong place.
And, IME, usually flat.
It also means that the poor sap at the door gets no feedback that it's working. With anything other than a wired doorbell I find it, if not almost mandatory, then certainly prudent to bang on the damn door after trying the button.
Scott
I had a BBC colleague who fixed a 12" speaker to his landing ceiling and the Westmister Chimes played back trough at cart machine when the doorbell was rung. However, we have a 300ft garden - that's why we need a portable bell.
Are you suggesting that its the transmitter battery? I 'd suggest, if anything its the receiver battery, but more often than not the culprit is anothe doorbell with the same coding as yours has picking up the other push. Certainly in flats this can happen quite easily as there are obviously more doors within range if there are floors above an below.
Brian
I'm working on a system where pressing the doorbell push either works a doorphone, or simply rings every phone in the house with a special cadence.
Horribly inefficient way of doing things - apart from the cost.
A decent outside mains bell which you can switch off when not needed?
The idea of carrying around a door bell as well as all the other things like phones etc seems mad to me.
Not sure BT will approve...
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