How to Place and Position Video Doorbell (2nd Gen)

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

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

One of the biggest mistakes people make is mounting their Ring Doorbell too high to catch people's faces. As illustrated above, viewing faces is not a problem if the Ring Doorbell is mounted at the correct height, approximately 48 inches above the ground. 

The second way your Ring 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, when 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 five to 25 feet outward from the fixture. They're also more sensitive to horizontal movement across the detection area than vertical. If you mount the Ring Doorbell too high, 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.