Video doorbells are a great way to monitor your housefront 24/7. But there are times when you want to shut it down. If you’re relocating or want to install your doorbell somewhere else, it’s safe to turn off its power.
For Ring Doorbell users, it’s a common issue that they are unable to find a way to turn off the doorbell. You can’t find an “on-off” switch. No turning-off option in the ring app.
So what to do now? Is it even possible to turn off Ring doorbells?
Keep on reading because I’m going to discuss everything you need to know about powering off Ring doorbells.
Let’s get started!
Can You Completely Turn off or Disable a Ring Doorbell?
The bitter truth is, there isn’t an option to turn off a Ring Doorbell. Some of the old generations of Ring doorbells have removable batteries. So if you own one of those, you can carefully remove the batteries to turn off the device.
Some of the newer doorbell models have non-replaceable batteries. If you try to remove them, it will result in voiding your warranty.
However, with some tweaking and playing with the settings in the Ring app, you can achieve a somewhat “temporary disabling” for your doorbell. So let’s see how you can do that.
Turning Off Ring Doorbell
As I said earlier, you can disable some of the functionalities of the Ring Doorbell to keep it less occupied.
This doesn’t mean you’re turning it off. Rather you’re just limiting its activities which are the closest you can go if you want to power off the doorbell. I will discuss some methods for doing so.
Method #1: Altering the Motion Settings
You can change the motion settings — namely motion zone and motion sensitivity — to temporarily disable your Ring Doorbell or at least keep its usage to a minimum.
The Motion settings you need to keep your eyes on are –
You can draw big and small zones out of the area your doorbell captures. Only motion captured inside the drawn zones will give you alerts. Anything outside the zones will not raise any alarm.
You can draw more than one zone. This lets you use your doorbell more effectively in areas that matter the most while avoiding areas you don’t need such as trees, roads, and neighboring houses.
By keeping the zones to a minimum and small-sized, you can reduce doorbell usage.
To set up zones,
Next is Motion Sensitivity. It’s a slider you can adjust to change how much motion will trigger an event. If you keep the slider on the furthest left on the minimum threshold, you will get alerts only when there is a lot of motion.
To change Motion Sensitivity,
If you have a wired Ring Doorbell, then
Finally, Motion Scheduling. This feature lets you set a timeframe in which you will not receive motion alerts. For example, you can set every Sunday from 7 AM to 7:15 AM to not receive motion detection.
This can be helpful if there is a regular event for which you don’t want to trigger the device. Note that you won’t be able to turn on motion alerts manually if they are turned off due to motion scheduling.
Method #2: Changing Modes in the Ring App
You can enable Modes settings in the Ring App. By configuring modes, you can change surveillance settings in all your cameras. You can tweak it to temporarily disable your Ring Doorbell too.
You can use either the Disarmed Mode or the Home Mode, depending on how much activity of the doorbell you want to disable.
- With the Disarmed Mode, you can disable motion detection for individual doorbells inside or outside your house.
- Home Mode lets you disable all Ring devices inside your home while the ones outside stay active.
To configure Modes,
Method #3: Using the Motion Snooze Option
The Motion Snooze allows you to snooze your doorbell’s motion detection. In other words, you can turn off motion alerts from a Ring device for a fixed amount of time.
If you wanted to power off your doorbell because of excessive notifications, this feature will let you silence them all temporarily. This is without tinkering with any device settings.
To turn on Motion Snooze,
Remember that if the motion alerts are turned off in the app, Motion Snooze will not work. Also, if you are using Alexa-enabled devices, their notifications will remain unaltered. This feature only affects the Ring app notifications.
Finals Words
For any electronic device, having a power-off system should be a must option. This is more of a necessity than a feature. Powering off a device when not in use can increase its longevity.
Ring does a bad job in this regard. As per community request, they should bring a way to completely switch off the new Ring Doorbell models.
Till then, your only option is to remove the batteries if they are removable, otherwise change motion settings, remove your device from the Ring app, or disconnect it from the Wi-Fi.
