A few weeks back, we had new windows and doors fitted to our house. As no-one could ever find the old doorbell and I didn’t want to drill holes in the frame of our pristine new plastic to mount the button in a more obvious location, I picked up a wireless doorchime kit from B&Q yesterday.
Our new doorbell is set to play a simple “ding dong” but sometimes it’s been playing a “Westminster” chime, seemingly randomly. Very strange. I had been concerned that we could experience interference either with or from our wireless network, DECT phones, microwave oven (hopefully not) or baby monitor but everything else seems to be working as expected.
One possible cause for concern was that the instructions said that the device was not suitable for PVCu doors because the metal inside the door would affect the signal range. Well, clearly it works from across the street as it turns out that a neighbour’s button is setting off our chime! Strangely, our button doesn’t seem to set off their chime but thankfully I can change the frequency that we are using – and I thought keeping up a reliable WiFi connection from the office to the living room was hard enough.
Just give me a length of copper cable… at least I know where that starts and ends!
Hi Mark,
Some of your concerns were legitimate issues with wireless doorbells in the past. However, most new wireless doorbells (over $50) will be able to block out other frequencies very well. As far as the chime issue, this is more interesting. I would need to know more to comment on it. However, it may just be the model is defective. If the issue continues, I might opt for a slightly better model.
Best,
Mark Taylor
Haha, how interesting! I had to get a new door bell because my neighbours had the same chime and I kept being woken up by their door bell thinking it was ours.
I have a cheap “uni-com” wireless doorbell that has just a single tune it plays. However, I noticed that it also plays a different tune completely randomly.
I isolated it to a new Owl electricity meter monitor I had installed. Unfortunately the doorbell is single channel and goes off regardless of the channel I set the Owl units to.
Now I need to find a decent, ‘digital’ doorbell. I’m not convinced that just buying based on it being >£35 is evidence it’s going to be good.
Because most of your wireless door chime operate in the same range, different manufacturer’s products can interfere with each other (even thought they swear they cannot.)
For example, the WC-180 by Security2020 will chime when a Carlon wireless door chime transmitter like the RC3253
If privacy codes do not change this, something else is causing the chime. Sometimes, when the transmitter battery is low, it will cause the chime receiver to ring randomly as well.