In a word: yes.
The Ring Chime Pro instantly solves two problems for Ring Video Doorbell owners. The first was that the original Chime – the bit that makes the noise in your house when someone presses the smart doorbell – simply wasn’t loud enough. We had our original Chime in the living room of our modest three-bedroom house, and we could barely hear it upstairs. Ring has cranked the volume to 11 with this new Chime, so that you’ve got a much better chance of hearing it at max volume.
The second great thing they’ve done with the Chime Pro is to make it double as a Wi-Fi extender. The Ring doorbell only works on the 2.4GHz Wi-Fi band and its Wi-Fi reception is poor. We can’t get a strong enough signal from our router to the doorbell, which is no more than five or six meters and a couple of walls away. Previously we were using a plug-in Wi-Fi extender as well as the Chime – now the single Chime Pro device can serve both purposes. That saves electricity and unnecessary congestion on the Wi-Fi network.
The Chime Pro has two external antennae sticking out either side of the unit, which might obstruct a neighbouring socket on a double wall plug. However, those antennae ensure that the Wi-Fi connection is solid. I’ve been using the Chime Pro for more than a week and we’ve not missed a single ring of the doorbell.
Sadly, the Chime Pro only extends the Wi-Fi to other Ring devices – you can’t use it as a Wi-Fi extender for your laptops, smartphones or other devices, which seems like an opportunity missed. And at £49, it’s one expensive doorbell chime. But if you need to make your Ring Video Doorbell system more audible and less hassle, it’s an expense that’s probably worth sucking up.
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Ring Chime Pro verdict
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Features
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Value for money
Summary
A near-essential accessory for Ring Video Doorbell owners, making it far easier to hear the doorbell from upstairs and doing away with the need for Wi-Fi extenders
I purchased a Video Doorbell 2 with a Chime pro wifi extender approximately 2-3 months ago. I was told that’s all you need your good to go.
It wasn’t inexpensive so maybe my expectations were too high. I am not impressed at all. I have paid for the yearly fee to ring as well in optimism .The delay time to view a ” motion at your door ” is too long as I constantly miss the person after ” accepting the motion “. But I can live with that as I can view it on replay 2 or 3 minutes later. But what bothers me the most is when someone rings the doorbell, at least 60% of the times after “accepting the ring ” the screen message on my phone is ” your phone is having difficulty communicating with ring “. It doesn’t seem to matter whether I’m 2 blocks away or right in the house. It’s just not consistent ! Please advise . P.S. I have checked my wifi signal and it is strong from my router.
The ring hardware and system is still rubbish in my opinion (yes this whole reply is just ‘my’ opinion so I have a defence if I get sued by them) in the UK at the moment. Great idea, badly executed and awful intentionally misleading customer services who blame customers equipment or internet instead of explaining they are still in startup stage. The RING system itself is still flawed. In layman’s terms, everything goes through the internet to their servers first, including all movements, hundreds of thousands of peoples videos and sounds for recording and playback through their (I believe still USA only serves) before hitting back to the UK and then to our devices and to our chimes and to our apps. Looks like they have issues and have not invested in a proper server network yet in the UK. It’s no wonder, so many delays from pressing the doorbell button to hearing a chime or opening the app. If this company only would come clean and advise customers that this is a new technology and it will only get better with time and investment maybe they would be successful in time. Instead, they fob us all off blaming our own internet or routers (or thick walls) making us all spend (actually waste) lots of time, effort and or money on more equipment trying to fix our ‘wifi’ to work better with their crap doorbells. In my view, not caring and actively making people who don’t know better waste more time and effort and money to save their own arses makes Ring is a very bad dishonest company and one to avoid completely. There are other devices now coming on to the market.
I WHOLEHEARTEDLY agree! The Ring system has cost a lot of money, and the piece of junk STILL doesn’t work. What makes it worse is that I can’t get any help from Ring!