I have successfully connected my Ring Doorbell Pro to a battery powered buzzer doorbell. I couldn’t find anything useful on the topic anywhere (other than a comment from Ring Support that it was not supported), but it’s actually pretty simple so I’m writing it up here in the hope that someone finds it useful.
I’m in the UK and the Ring Pro ships without the Pro Power Kit (see here). A quick online help-chat to the excellent Ring Support and they’d popped a free one in the post for me which arrived inside a week.
The Pro Power Kit is designed for American-style wired ding-dong doorbells. If you install a Ring doorbell in series with one of these bells, the doorbell breaks the circuit and so the Pro Power Kit is required to bypass the wired doorbell terminals and supply power to the Ring Pro. When the Ring Pro is pressed, the Pro Power Kit outputs a short burst of voltage across the two pins which ding-dongs the bell.
My Ring Pro is powered by a 24V AC plug-in transformer. All I did was connect the pins on the Pro Power Kit instead to a SPST 24VAC non-latching relay. Thus when the bell is rung, the voltage burst throws the relay closed for a short time. I wired the output throw of the relay into my battery-powered bell circuit, so my bell buzzes for the duration of the voltage burst. Simple but works well.
One additional point: in the Ring app, you can configure your external doorbell as either mechanical or digital. The only thing this setting does is changes the length of the voltage burst from the Power Kit. Mechanical is about half a second (think ‘ding-dong’). Digital lets you specify a number of seconds, so I can set my bell to buzz from 0.5 to 10 seconds (depending on how much I want to annoy the wife).
(Minor inconvenience, for full disclosure: whenever the transformer is powered up, the bell buzzes for about 15 seconds…)
Hi! I did the same but using a small DC relay. Instead of the bell, I have a full bridge rectifier with a electrolytic capacitor on the DC side and the relay. This way the Ring is powered and when send the bell signal the relay closes and activate my electronic doorbell.
To answer Prembo, the coil is not energized since the Ring does not let enough current on the line unless it wants to ring the bell.
Below a crude sketch of how it works. I used the DC relay since was a lot smaller and everything fitted in a 1 inch cube.
Hi
I’m looking for help with getting a ring pro to trigger my existing digital doorbell. I understand the concept of using a relay as in your write up.
But I am a real novice control side, (I’m an electrician, so mains side , transformer etc is fine. But could you do almost a shopping list for me, so I can copy your design parrot fashion especially with bridge rectifier and connection.
Hi Steve. Not sure whether you prefer my approach or Cristian’s, but mine is shown below. The only difference is that Cristian has converted AC to DC in order to use a smaller DC relay, but the principle is identical.
I’ve got links in my original post to all the components I used. So you need a Ring Pro Power Kit, an AC non latching relay matching your transformer output voltage and…that’s it. I used a SPDT relay because I couldn’t find the right SPST but either works fine. The whole lot fits inside my existing doorbell housing.
FYI I’m definitely not an electrician nor have any training so apologies if the diagram or explanations aren’t clear!
Hi
Thanks for replying.
My pro power kit has a sticker around it calling it a bypass kit, and only access to push terminals. When I remove sticker I now see it is pro power kit v2 and I now have access to a plug in terminal. Do these terminals do the same thing. I.e does it matter which way I connect, the bypass terminals or the plug in terminal.
I’ll be honest, I haven’t got a clue how the V2 works. Looking on the Ring support page it does say the pins are reversible so it doesn’t matter which way round you connect them, but I really don’t know if the V2 will work with the setup we’re describing here. Might it be worth contacting Ring support and asking for a V1 power kit?
Solved.
With UK kits now. You need to take the sticker off to expose the plug to utilise it as a pro power kit v2. I diss assembled and soldered leads into circuit board. The way it is distributed to UK customers now, you only have access to bypass terminals, which does not switch the relay as we require. But like I say, once you take apart the box it is achievable.
Hi,
Came across this while looking to add my doorbell to the Ring Pro 3 system, it still seems to be the best description of adding a relay to the circuit.
Just wanted to update a couple of misconceptions here and put my 6d in –
The power kit does NOT provide a burst of power to trigger the relay.
The power comes from the AC Power supply, via the Ring which goes low-impedance when the button is pressed. (If and only if the doorbell option is enabled in the settings)
V2 is electrically the same as V1, either would work in the circuits here. Both are just a constant current source (Looking inside, the V2 is based around an LCB710 opto-relay, my guess is that the LED is wired in series with the NC relay. This means that as the current rises, the LED turns on, the relay starts to open and so the current reduces.)
Putting the Power Kit in parallel with the load ensures that, if you have a high-impedance load (electronic doorbell, or a relay to drive the doorbell), enough current bypasses the load to trickle-charge the Ring.
It seems to make no difference if you use the connector terminals or the pushfit ones. (The LCB710 has two output transistors - it may be that they are sent separately to the two set of terminals)
I was planning to put a relay in my doorbell, so that in the event of a power cut I would still have notification. However, when I started the fitting I found that a battery had corroded and attacked the battery contacts, so I settled for AC power:
I used an old 12v wall blister DC Power Supply, unscrewed it and took out the bridge rectifier circuit board, resoldering the output wires direct to the transformer output. This gives about 15v rms AC.
I then re-used the rectifier board to convert AC to DC for the doorbell (a Friedland 6v DC Ding-dong type).
My doorbell coil has a low impedance (~6ohm), so the only voltage drop in standby is about 1.2v across the rectifier diodes. This gives ~13.5v for charging the doorbell, (or for activating the solenoid when the bell is pressed. That’s a bit high for the doorbell, but it is only for a few seconds and it seems to be happy. )
Omitting the relay means that I did not need the Pro Power kit after all -
