My 15-year-old daughter can watch two televisions at once, play CDs at wall-shaking volume and carry on a three-way telephone conversation, and she will still hear the pizza delivery guy ring the doorbell.
It’s a selective-hearing thing. She always hears the doorbell, but she never hears when I tell her to come out of the shower after 30 minutes.
Adding a wireless doorbell to your house is so easy it barely even qualifies as a do-it-yourself project. Getting a balky wired doorbell to work takes a little more know-how, but that’s usually pretty easy too.
Wired door chimes
The classic built-in doorbell is a simple device. When someone pushes the button by the door, an electrical circuit is completed, and the bell gets power to ring. If the bell fails to ring, it’s usually because the circuit is interrupted.
Doorbells work on low-voltage wiring, so there’s almost no danger of getting shocked while working on the doorbell button or the chimes. That makes doorbell repair a good project even for the homeowner who’s afraid of electricity.
If the bell fails to ring when the button is pushed, check the button first. It’s usually the weak link in the system and the easiest component to fix.
Unscrew or pry off the casing surrounding the button and remove any screws holding the body of the button to the wall. Carefully pull it a few inches from the wall, and you should see two wires held down with two screws.
Touch the blade of a screwdriver to both screws or the bare portions of the wires at once to create a short-circuit. The doorbell should ring. As mentioned earlier, this is a low-voltage circuit and you’re not going to get electrocuted.
If the bell rings when short-circuited but not when you press the button, the button is defective. Look at a home-improvement or hardware store for a replacement button; it takes about five minutes to install. Plain buttons cost about $4 to $5 and decorative ones run about $10 to $15.
If the button isn’t defective but the bell still won’t ring, check out the chime unit itself next. Once you’ve removed the plastic or wooden cover from the chimes, you’ll find the guts of most wired doorbells are about the same. You should expect to see wires running to three screws marked front, rear and “trans” for transformer.
All the wires should be screwed down firmly, and the connections should be free of corrosion. You can clean off corrosion deposits by spraying with an electrical contact cleaner or removing the screws and sanding the connections with fine sandpaper. Vacuuming to remove dust can also be helpful.
The bell sound is made by a plunger striking a metal bar. Pull back the plunger and let it go to see if it strikes the bar correctly. Sometimes the plunger gets gummy, and cleaning it will allow the bell to work.
If you do these checks and repairs and the bell still won’t ring, the problem is probably in the wiring or in the transformer. If you have a circuit tester and can do a little wiring, any basic electrical repair book will tell you how to fix it. If not, call an electrician or replace your doorbell with a wireless one.
If your built-in bell works but you want a doorbell that’s louder or classier, you can buy a replacement chime unit and install it yourself. Replacement chime units can cost from about $15 to more than $100, but most fall in the $20 to $50 range.
To replace a chime, remove the cover and find connections for the power-supply wires. Make notes on which wires are connected to which terminals before disconnecting them.
Remove the old chime unit from the wall, making sure not to let the electrical connections slip back into their hole. Losing the wires behind the wall is a real nuisance. Hang the new chime unit and connect the wires in the same order they were on the old chime.
Wireless bells
You can replace a built-in doorbell system with wireless doorbells if you don’t want to bother with wiring. The doorbell button in a wireless doorbell system is a transmitter. When someone pushes the button, it sends a coded signal to a receiver attached to the bell, and the bell sounds.
An advantage to wireless systems is that you can buy several chime units all tuned to the same button. You can place chimes all over the house and never fail to hear the doorbell ringing again.
The button unit requires a small battery that must be changed periodically. Installation takes about two minutes and is a simple matter of gluing or screwing the button by the outside of the door.
Most indoor bell units plug into an electrical outlet so no wiring at all is required. Some wireless bells are battery-operated, but I can say from personal experience that it’s easy to forget to keep fresh batteries in them.
In addition to being easy to install, wireless doorbells are portable. You can take them with you when you move, and you can move the bell unit between rooms when convenient.
The least-expensive wireless doorbells are plain white plastic affairs that sell at home improvement stores for $12 to $20. But wireless doorbells also come in designer styles with elaborate musical chimes for up to about $100.
In some houses with a built-in doorbell, you might want to add a second set of chimes so you can hear the bell when you’re not near the main chimes.
