Proper positioning for your Ring Video Doorbell (2nd Generation)

The proper positioning of your Ring Video Doorbell (2nd Generation) depends on a number of factors including the layout of your garden, the distance from your front door and the street, objects within the doorbell's field of view, the height of the door and more.

Seeing the world two ways

Your Ring Video Doorbell sees the world in two ways. First, the camera on your doorbell has a very wide view of the world as illustrated below:

One of the biggest mistakes people make is mounting their Ring Video Doorbell too high in the belief that they need to do this in order to catch people's faces. In fact, as illustrated above, viewing faces is not a problem if the Ring Video Doorbell is mounted at the correct height of approximately 1.2 metres above the ground. 

The second way your Ring Video Doorbell sees the world is through a network of PIR, or passive infrared, motion sensors. These are heat sensors that detect motion by monitoring heat within the detection area. Since people are hotter than the surrounding areas, as a person enters the detection area the heat measurements change. The motion sensors register this change as movement and send out an alert. As illustrated in the image below, the motion sensors have a much more focused field of view than the camera: 

The motion sensors in your Ring Video Doorbell are designed to detect motion up to 155 degrees horizontally and from 1.5 to 7.5 metres outward from the fixture. They're also more sensitive to horizontal movement across the detection area than vertical. Mount your doorbell too high and you're more likely to catch the heat of passing cars than the heat of incoming visitors. 

Now that you understand how your Ring Video Doorbell sees the world, positioning it properly becomes much easier. 

Click here to read about changing the viewing angle with a Wedge Kit or Corner Kit.