At the beginning of 2021 our household invested in a Ring doorbell. It’s a pretty good device but in the early hours of 7th December something happened (possibly related to the AWS outage) and the doorbell decided that it no longer wanted to connect to the wi-fi network it’s been using for months.
This was not noticed for a few days, confusing us as to why delivery people had taken to either knocking on the door or posting through “sorry we missed you…” cards. Today (12th December) I spent some time reconnecting the device and thought a quick blog post on the steps needed would be good incase anyone hits the same issue.
I first wanted to check that my home wi-fi was not at fault, so I rebooted my home network and moved the access point even closer to the Ring doorbell. Still no connection.
Next up I used the Ring app to try and reconnect the device to the wi-fi, placing the doorbell into set up mode and re-choosing the wi-fi network. No joy, just two flashing white lights. My home network had not seen the Ring for several days, which to me means that it was not even attempting a connection.
I tried putting the doorbell on to a new network using a phone as a hotspot, same issue and same two flashing white lights. At least this showed that the issue was not with the wi-fi network.
Next up I replaced the doorbell’s battery with a freshly (100%) charged battery but this did not resolve the connection. A quick Google and a page on Ring’s website indicated that the doorbell can be reset by holding in the orange set-up button (inside the doorbell case) for 20 seconds.
Cue me standing in the garden counting 20 seconds, re-entering wi-fi details and thinking eureka as finally the doorbell connected (showing on the home network) and proudly verbally announced that it had an update to perform.
Soon after the Ring app believed the doorbell had finished its update but could not stream any live feed. My home network believed the doorbell had connected for a few minutes and then had gone back offline. It took the Ring app a little time to realise this and then show the same issue as before (doorbell not connected to wi-fi).
Not one to give up I decided to go through the reset process again. Another moment of connectivity, the doorbell again declared that an update was in process and again the doorbell went offline after a few minutes.
By now I was feeling a little defeated but decided to try one more thing – I removed the device from my Ring app, went through the physical reset process again and this time added the device back to my Ring app as a new doorbell. A connection happened and the doorbell announced once again that it was updating. This time I held back with celebration and waited. Time past, the doorbell had finished the update, still showed as connected and live stream worked. I still waited until a few hours had past, and now can write that I think the doorbell is working as expected again.
Removing the device from the Ring app, physically resetting it and installing it in the Ring app again required putting back motion / alert settings etc.
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