Video doorbells come with all sorts of really neat features, but one feature that tends to get overlooked is the ability to shut off your indoor doorbell chime whenever you want.
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This is great if you don’t want the kids woken up when someone comes to the door or if you want some peace yourself. I mute the indoor chime so it doesn’t startle one of my cats, because she’s literally a big scaredy cat and won’t tolerate other people. And since 80% of the people that come to our door are postal carriers dropping off a package, it’s not worth startling the cat.
What Does This Do Exactly?
If your video doorbell is hooked up to a mechanical indoor chime (or a plug-in add-on chime, like this one from Ring), you can tell it to silence the chime in the settings. All this does is render the indoor chime inoperable whenever someone rings your doorbell. Keep in mind that this doesn’t break the chime, but only interrupts the connection until you tell it not to anymore.
The way a traditional doorbell works is that there is a small wire going from the doorbell chime to the doorbell button, and then another small wire going from the button back to the chime. When these two wires connect (by pressing the doorbell button), it completes the electrical circuit, and the chime goes off.
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When you mute the indoor chime on your video doorbell, it essentially just keeps the wires disconnected no matter what, even when the button is pressed. Therefore, the indoor chime will never sound.
How to Mute Your Indoor Chime
The Nest Hello and the SkyBell HD all let you mute the indoor chime from their respective mobile apps in the settings. As for the Ring Doorbell, only the Ring Pro lets you do this with a mechanical chime. If you have the regular Ring Doorbell, you’ll need the add-in chime.
On the Nest Hello, the process for muting the chime is pretty simple. Just tap on the settings gear icon up in the top-right corner of the screen when viewing the live feed, and then just hit the toggle switch at the top next to “Indoor Chime On/Off.”
For the SkyBell HD, you’ll go into the settings, tap “Indoor Chime,” and then hit the toggle switch next to “Indoor Chime.”
On the Ring Doorbell with the the add-on chime, you’ll select the chime on the main screen, tap “Chime Snooze,” and then select “Turn Off.” You can also select a period from 1 to 12 hours.
On the Ring Pro, select it from the main screen, tap on the settings gear icon, select “Doorbell Kit Settings,” and then tap on the toggle switch next to “Ring my in-home doorbell.”
Unfortunately, the only device that allows you to set a time limit is the Ring Doorbell when paired with the add-on digital chime. All the other models require that you go back into the settings to re-enable the indoor chime.
