A power surge shot the original doorbell chime a few years back, and I just took what the electrician had in stock.
The last THREE times someone pressed the door bell button, I did not notice. Had my hearing aids in, each time. This chime just gives one ding! and I guess I miss it.
So I’m thinking I need to get a new, musical doorbell chime? And I need one with one sound for the front door, and a different sound for the side door (which is what this house has always had, 2 different sounds).
But, before I go ahead and start searching for something online, I thought I’d ask if anyone has suggestions on here.
Note: I do not own a cell phone; tried one about 3 years back, could not figure it out, returned it. I’m not interested in getting one. I don’t want a wifi thing, I have no clue re technology. A wired chime is what I am focused on.
Get a Ring doorbell device (or maybe a Nest or another brand device). (although I just read that you don’t own a smartphone - maybe you have a relative who can set up such a device for you. I can control my Ring devices mostly through a computer app but Ring has threatened in the past to inactivate the Windows app and make users rely on an Android or iOS device - if you have an iPad or an Android tablet, you could probably control a Ring device through that).
I opted to get an original Ring Doorbell Pro wired device back in 2016 or 2017. It’s still working great.
I opted for wired vs. battery-powered as I didn’t want to have to worry about a rechargeable battery eventually dying. Read the instructions before you get one (of any brand). You might have to upgrade your doorbell transformer. IIRC, you have to have at least a 16-volt transformer for the Ring device that I got. I bought 16-volt transformer at Home Depot to replace the 12-volt transformer we previously had. You can either install such a doorbell and transfomer yourself or hire someone to install it.
Your install location has to have good Wi-Fi connectivity. You can use your smartphone as a meter to judge whether signal strength is good enough. Since our router signal had to go through an interior sheet rock wall or two as well as the exterior brick wall, we installed a NetGear Wi-Fi extender in an interior electrical outlet close to the front doorbell position.
The only glitchy thing over the years is that if there’s a power outage, the original Ring Doorbell Pro often fails to reboot when the power comes back on. Flipping the circuit breaker it’s on off for 10 to 15 seconds, then flipping it on again always gets the device up and running again.
Just as a doorbell, it works great. You can get Wi-Fi doorbell chimes to plug into electrical outlets in far corners of your house so you don’t have depend on one physical wired chime (that may not be very loud). Also, via the Ring app, you can sound an alert on your smartphone or if you have notifications sent to your ’s, you can hear the doorbell ring in your ears and you can choose the sound of the doorbell chime/alert from a bunch of options and control its loudness.
The video/speaker aspect of such a device is great, too. We were once speeding up to Austin at 70 mph on Interstate 35. Via a cellular connection, with my smartphone mounted on a ProClip phone mount on the car dashboard, we heard and saw an Amazon driver ring our front doorbell with a package for my wife. The wife turned on the intercom feature, talked to the woman, and asked her to leave it with our next-door neighbor. Then, since the doorbell video pointed in the direction of the neighbor’s house, she could actually see the neighbor come out into her front yard and take the package from the Amazon driver.
Probably all such smart doorbells these days have that allows you to select the area in front of your door that you want to monitor and allows you to set the sensitivity and other parameters of motion detection at your front door. And if you have a bunch of such devices, you can switch them all from a “I’m Home” setting to “I’m Away-Please Guard the House” setting with one button tap.
Relative to your not having a smartphone, that’s perhaps unfortunate. We control our interior and exterior lights, our upstairs and downstairs thermostats, our dehumidifiers, our Ring devices, electrical outlet plug switches, Amazon and Google AI assistants, as well as my TV streamer for my HA’s, all through our smartphones. When we drive into our driveway at night we can turn on the lights in our driveway from our car and open the garage door all from a smartphone. And many of the apps have distinctive sound alerts. When the wife come home (or anyone else should somehow manage to open the garage door,) a distinctive chime sounds in my ears and if either of us forgets and leaves the door up, I get a similar distinctive sound notification at a time interval that I can set that the door is still up. So my HA’s have become a sound monitor of what’s going on in my environment. Such alerts are only occasional, not constant, and I value the transmission of info as to what’s going on around the house and am not bothered by sound notifications.
Even if this spiel doesn’t help you, it might be of some interest to someone else with hearing loss who has trouble hearing a physical doorbell chime as soon as they get any distance from it.
After a decade of use I can highly recommend Grothe Mistral doorbells. They are battery or mains powered and have an outdoor range of 100s of feet. They are wireless but just in the non-wired sense only, no smart phone or other technology needed.
Just put in some D batteries and hang it on the wall.
You can have multiple buttons with different chimes, basically anyway you want it. I have three doorbells and two buttons. Each button has a different chime and all three bells chime when either button is pressed.
They even have a setting to flash as well as chime when the bell is rung.
They are certainly not cheap and I can’t see immediately if this excellent German product is available in the US but as I wrote I can’t recommend them more highly.
There are lots of wireless doorbells on the market, they are easy to fit, and portable, some are also visual, with flashing lights… The one I have is a Byron, 3 different sound levels of door chimes, loud, very loud or extremely loud… also has the feature of having a flashing light if you switch that on as well, so you have both visual & sound… I got mines a couple years back from Amazon… Cheers Kev
Yeah @Zebras, I used to install these type, years ago, along with many other types of hearing loss environmental equipment, I had one myself for many years, twas the radio alarm clock type, also did the smoke alarm, phone and doorbell, before it eventually gave up the ghost, lasted well in excess of a decade though… Cheers Kev
Yeah @Zebras, like everything else, technologically they have moved on, we installed literally hundreds of these type (not as advanced though, they worked with radio signal’s) via “Deaf Services”, a council funded & run initiative to help folks function with a hearing loss, most of us hearing specialist support workers here in the Scottish Highlands had some kind of hearing loss, and we’re actively recruited because of their hearing loss! Back then (early 1990’s , before I joined) we had over 40 support workers covering an area equivalent to the size of Belgium, but with only a population of around 350k… Sadly, that service is a former shadow of itself, extremely depleted due to monetary constraints & service cutbacks… Cheers Kev
Hi @Zebras, must be connected to the internet via a “Lan RJ45” cable then, unless it emits its own mobile WiFi signal? The app needs an internet connection in order to function… Cheers Kev😜
Edit. Just noticed you updated & edited an earlier post, with some images of your app, so it is a mobile WiFi signal, probably works much the same as electric smart meters? Cheers Kev
It sounds to me that @Freedom doesn’t want all that fancy tech stuff. From the description of the original chime, it was a t6 volt wired chime that went “ding-dong” for the front door and “dong” for the other door. If that’s what you want, Newhouse sells those things:
“www.newhousehardware.com/product-category/chimes/3”
The downside is that if the doorbell button sticks, it rings continuously.
Many of us with hearing issues find that REAL bells, not electronic ones, are easier to hear.
Since Freedom is posting on the forum, presumably he/she has the technology to have Internet service, which often involves Wi-Fi in preference to an Ethernet connection where you have to run wires around the house. So, given Wi-Fi for an Internet connection, it’s not a big leap to have a Wi-Fi doorbell (although they are quite a bit more expensive than just getting a new wired chime for a classic wired doorbell system). Wireless doorbell chimes that use something other than Wi-Fi may be battery-powered and if so, one will have a bit of battery-tending to do.
The thing I like about the Ring doorbell is that it interfaces with Amazon Echo devices (Amazon now owns Ring and is marketing as a security service like ADT, etc.). I have three Echo Show devices scattered around the house with either 5-inch or 10-inch screens. If the doorbell rings, I can speak to one of these devices and just say, “Echo, show me the front door.” I don’t have to find my smartphone or fire up my computer. Within a few seconds, I have a live video of the front door and I can see who rang the doorbell. Or, more likely, if the Show device said initially, instead of ringing the doorbell, “Motion detected at your front door,” I will see that UPS or Amazon just dumped a package on my front doorstep rather than ringing the doorbell to let me know a delivery has been made. Just dumping a package seemed to drastically increase with the start of the COVID pandemic as I presumed drivers did not want to be exposed to residents, masks or not.
A plain old, wired chime is not going to tell you when a package is just left at your front door. With my house, the front doorstep is elevated several feet above my front lawn level so anyone who drives by can see the package resting by my door. So, I like the inherent notification capability of a video doorbell that usually goes along with an e-mail notification from UPS or Amazon that a delivery has just been made.
The most fun event is when I get the e-mail notification that a delivery has just been made but the doorbell video shows nothing on the front step. Usually, that means a neighbor on a nearby street with the same street number but a different permutation of the “redundant” street names in our HOA got my package!
Weighing in with my own doorbell recommendation: Doorbird5!
It runs on iPhone or Android, and let’s you not only SEE and talk to whomever is at the front gate or front door, but also automatically OPEN the gate from anywhere in the world - I kid you not.
Both hubs & I have the app on our Samsung Galaxy Flip4 cell phones. But here’s the COOL part: when anyone rings at the front gate or front door, MY aids will stream the “Ding-Dong!” right to me. So I will never ever miss someone at the door.
We have a couple extra ringers plugged in around the house so hubs can hear the old-fashioned kind of doorbell chime played ambiently in the house. But I have to cackle at the clever streamed door chime I hear! In fact, if we’re across the country, I’m the one who knows instantly if there’s someone at our gate outside 3,000 mi away. I talk to them (streamed, natch!) and then either open the gate or tell them to buzz off.
LOVE IT. It’s take some tech setup, but is overall very GUI friendly and easy to use. We never lock ourselves out of the house or yard or need a house key if we have our cell phones with the Doorbird app on it.
@DaveL@hass5744 have THREE dogs. Yes, doorbell on TV, on on the radio when we are in the car, and they go nuts! This one Ding! only gets a soft Woof! from one of them. So they aren’t aware of this thing either. Hence I need another one.
I’ll have a look at Newhouse, thanks for those links @Herbhornist . Oops, those only do the Ding Dong and Ding, that’s what I have now. I will have to search for a musical chime - Westminster and such. I need more than 1 high tone from the door, as I don’t hear that.
Methuen, MA
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