Video doorbell pain - so ring ?

[Adsibob]

On 14/05/2025 at 23:07, Adsibob said:

I know Ring gets a poor report on this forum because of the subscription, but I’m fairly happy now that I have improved my outdoor WiFi.

we have:

1 doorbell cam (wired, but only for power)

3 outdoor PoE cams

1 outdoor battery cam plus with a solar panel battery booster

 2 indoor cameras

 

All seven cameras get 180 days rolling unlimited cloud storage which has always been reliable. If I want to keep something beyond the 180 day period, I need to download it.

 

I pay £80 a year subscription, which is a lot, but for 7 devices I don’t think that’s so much. I can have as many devices as I want for that price, although I doubt we would ever get more than we have at the moment, possibly one more if we ever upgrade our shed into a man-cave.

 

So having raved about this a couple of weeks ago, I am now having some problems with two of my three ring PoE cameras. It appears to be dropping the connection, despite these being hard wired via PoE. I rebooted the Ubiquiti router and that fixed the issue, but the fix only lasted 10 minutes. Now the issues is happening again. My third Ring PoE is not affected by this issue. The only difference between the one that is working and the two that are not is that the one that is working is wired directly into the ubquiti router, whereas the two that are not working are wired into a switch which is wired into a homeplug that is plugged into the wall. Whilst that may not sound optimal, it's worked without problem since I installed it some 3 months ago. Both the homeplug and the switch are made by TP-Link which is usually a reliable brand, so I'm not sure what's happening. 

[LiamJones]

Can you remove the switch to take that out the equation? Run a single ring directly off the homeplug? Dependant on results, swap the homeplug or the switch? I’d be surprised if the route cause were the rings

[Adsibob]

2 minutes ago, LiamJones said:

Can you remove the switch to take that out the equation? Run a single ring directly off the homeplug? Dependant on results, swap the homeplug or the switch? I’d be surprised if the route cause were the rings

thanks. Yes that's a good idea. Doesn't make sense for it to be the rings. The switch and the homeplug is in a boiler cupboard, so maybe they've overheated? That said, most of the stuff in there is insulated and I can't imagine the temperature rises to much above 40C. I will do that tonight. Just paranoid as I'm not home now and these cameras are covering the side of the house where our house was broken into from (which prompted me to purchase the cameras in the first place).

[LiamJones]

Running copper end to end is the only way to guarantee a solid connection, but that doesn’t help you now. Can you run a temporary cat5/6 to one of the cams, just until you sort out the plugs? Even then, I’m not sure I’d ever trust home plugs for home security purposes.

[Thorfun]

30 minutes ago, Adsibob said:

thanks. Yes that's a good idea. Doesn't make sense for it to be the rings. The switch and the homeplug is in a boiler cupboard, so maybe they've overheated? That said, most of the stuff in there is insulated and I can't imagine the temperature rises to much above 40C. I will do that tonight. Just paranoid as I'm not home now and these cameras are covering the side of the house where our house was broken into from (which prompted me to purchase the cameras in the first place).

Could you have plugged something new into the ring main that’s causing noise?

[Adsibob]

4 hours ago, Thorfun said:

Could you have plugged something new into the ring main that’s causing noise?

It’s possible that this problem has been happening for a while, and I’ve only just realised. That said, I have now unplugged everything that was plugged into that homeplug (there was actually an extension lead plugged into it, and two low draw things were plugged into the extension lead: a zone valve and the TP-Link switch powering the two ring cameras). 
if this doesn’t fix it, I will try @LiamJones’s suggestion. 

[Kelvin]

That’s odd about the Reolink Doorbell and chime combo. We’ve not had any trouble with it disconnecting from the chime which is around 10m from the doorbell. 

[awk]

Have you checked whether the extension lead has surge protection? Powerline adaptors struggle to connect through this

Edited June 4 by awk