I’ve been active in the “Wyze Doorbell v2 chime controller” not working discussion thread, but this is a different anomaly.
I upgraded my transformer from a 16v 10VA to a 24v 40VA version to resolve issues with the chime not working and the video doorbell rebooting after multiple keypresses. All was well and good even for Halloween when we had about ~100 Trick or Treaters.
About 11pm on Halloween night the doorbell rang. (We have a digital chime that plays a 7 second song).
Ok, it’s Halloween and there are the occasional tricksters who want to ignore the 20+ pounds of candy we handed out and Ding-Dong-Ditch is a lot better than eggs and TP. I grabbed my phone to look at the doorbell cam. Huh, it won’t connect.
Then the chime rings again and again and again. It won’t stop. Ok, maybe something is seriously wrong and someone is trying to wake us up. I make my way to the front door in my robe and no one is there. I step out to look at the doorbell and the light on the doorbell is flickering and there is an audible clicking noise.
Uh-oh, that’s not good.
I run down to the basement to power cycle the transformer. Luckily, when I replaced my transformer that was attached to the metal electrical box on the furnace disconnect I rewired it to be on the switched side of the furnace disconnect for ease of turning off the power to it when diagnosing the chime issue.
After the power cycle the doorbell rebooted and everything returned to normal. I looked at my other Wyze cameras to see if someone had come around and nothing was there nor had they rebooted. That said, some equipment in the house rebooted, such as our smart thermostats. We apparently had a brief power brownout. I say brownout instead of power outage because not everything in my home rebooted. My desktop computer’s UPS didn’t show a power event nor did the DVR that I checked reboot, but the microwave clock reset. This means we likely just got a low-voltage event from the grid that only caused certain equipment to reboot.
The issue is that I’m afraid that this will happen again as power brownouts in our area happen on a not infrequent basis. I’m not sure that I won’t find myself woken up in the middle of the night again or come home from a vacation to find out my doorbell went down and the chime has been ringing for days. I know one possible solution is to rewire the transformer to run off of an UPS, but that is another investment to make this $35 device work reliably.
I’m considering what to do now. The Wyze Video Doorbell 2 has great picture quality and I love having the continual constant recording, but if it’s not going to be reliable and cause these issues, I need to go back to v1 and the electronic chime.