Best bell wire for Ring doorbell pro 28 February 2021 at 11:49PM in Techie Stuff 5 replies 121 views

longwalks1

im running in new cable for our Ring Doorbell Pro and running it through conduit to the consumer unit. Is there a better cable to use, or any bell wire will do?  Wasn’t sure if a thicker cable would work better?  or does it not work like that 

Sandtree

All its doing is supplying power, as long as its correctly rated for your transformer then its fine.

vacheron

The ring pro is designed to run from "most" standard doorbell transformers, but requires 20VA of power.so just shy of 1.25A at 16V or  0.8A at 24V.
Therefore the main issue would be if your existing doorbell transformer was only just putting out 16-17V, then at 1.25A you may experience sufficient voltage drop to prevent it from working (but that largely depends on the length of the cable run).

If you know the voltage from your transformer and what size bell wire you are using then you you (we) can calculate how long a cable run should be OK for that particular wire.  
 

fred246

The US seems to have a standard doorbell transformer which we don't have in the UK. I just found it easier to buy the UK adapter that they sell as an accessory. I think they have started to ship them with UK adapters. Not very money saving I know. There must be loads of transformers that they supply thrown in the bin.

TadleyBaggie

When I wired my Ring doorbell in I didn't even check if the existing transformer was compatible, it worked just fine.

Sandtree

TadleyBaggie said:

When I wired my Ring doorbell in I didn't even check if the existing transformer was compatible, it worked just fine.

That'd be luck rather than good judgement then.

We in the UK have traditionally used much less powerful transformers in out doorbells than in the USA, the Nest Hello for Europe has been adjusted to only need 8VA (rather than the 10VA in the USA) to help compensate. Thankfully ours was enough to power the doorbell itself but not sufficient to work with the mechanical chime so had to replace that with an electronic one as didnt want the sounding of the chime inside to be dependent on the internet connection, google/amazon servers etc.