The Flux Capacitor Doorbell

My husband has been working on our doorbell most of the day.   Or rather the part of the day after he slept late.   He’s had a cold and hasn’t been sleeping well lately.   But the Nest Camera Doorbell had arrived and he wanted to get it working.  

In my childhood we had a doorbell.   It was a button outside the house and then a ‘ding dong’ sound played inside from a little box in the hall near the bedrooms.   I didn’t think much about the wiring, the button or the sound, because for the entirety of my childhood it did exactly as it was meant to do—it alerted us when people were at the door.  

Our new house is more complicated.   It didn’t start out complicated, it only grew into complexity out of necessity and new technology.    The first thing we discovered is we couldn’t hear the doorbell.   The chime itself was on the second floor, but we weren’t up there much and our infants or toddlers that lived up there pretty much had no idea what to do about a ding dong sound.    So my husband took steps.

He wired the doorbell sound into the Niles system and accompanying speakers he’d had wired with the house.   That fixed things because two floors down in the basement when the doorbell rang we could hear it.    It turned out even our neighbor could tell when someone rang our doorbell because we initially forgot to turn off the outdoor speakers which were at high volume.  

The hitch with the speaker relay was the delay in the sound.   The circuit would open and my dog would run, barking straight up the stairs.   No one knew until a second or so later that there was some at the door.   In later years we’d just tell people the dog had ESP.

But now your doorbell isn’t complete it would seem unless it has a camera attached that will send a text message to you so you can get up to speed on who’s at your door from your phone or watch while you sit comfortably at your desk on another floor.   Or so the marketing materials would have you believe.

Once the product arrived all that needed to be done was to have my husband do the easy job of hooking it up.   If you’re guessing that we ran into troubles, you would be correct.   Or rather he ran into trouble.   I just gave him the, “I’m sure you can do it, you’re good at all this electrical stuff” from the sidelines.

The problem was the totality of circuitry in the mix.   The original door chime, the wire to the Niles system, the amount of watts going to the different parts of the system.   What was in loop, what wasn’t.  What could be excluded, what had to be involved.   How to get enough  power to get the camera working.   It was a total mess.   My husband at one point had this drawing going on the kitchen counter:

 
He had to do a Lowes run at that point followed by a period of time in the workshop downstairs.   He emerged looking rather victorious only to have to rethink his electrical schema once again with the new variables factored in:

I remarked that it looked much more flux capacitor-ish and a lot less complicated (less the gigawatts) and that surely he had it licked this time.   He wired it in under the cabinet with the Niles and then I heard him say, “colors?!  There are wire colors?!”

You would think that grey and white would not be the go to colors of Nest for their wires.   Apparently color scheme is all important, even if it’s at the price of clarity.   Fortunately one iPhone light and some wire checks later and he got lucky, getting it right on the first go round.

So now it all works.   Except the holes in the brick on the front porch are slightly off.   He was going to do that tomorrow I think, but there’s a chance I hear the hammer drill running now upstairs.

The Big Boy Update:  Last night my son wanted to put on one of my daughter’s footie pajamas.   They are too small for him but he really wanted to wear it.   He called it his, “Lah-Vay” pajamas.   I didn’t get what he meant until he unzipped the front, splitting the word LOVE on the front of the pajama right down the middle, dividing it into the two syllables he was saying individually.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter must have driven around in her Tesla Model Tiny S car (from Santa) for well over an hour today.   I kept hoping the battery would drain, but it’s got a lot of “range” apparently.    She had a very good time, only hitting one thing once, which thankfully wasn’t any of the cars over for a St. Patrick’s Day party next door.