New house and seems like you have to go with some sort of a smart video capable doorbell. The obvious choices are Ring and Nest, maybe SkyBell, the less obvious choice is DoorBird, which is what we went with. Ring and other lock you into recurring billing arrangements and they are closed API, big negatives for me. DoorBirds don’t pop up on all the top 10 lists, but they are on some of them and probably should be on all of them. Open API, good functionality, German company, good documentation, pretty good looking, cost in line with other options at $350, not cheap but Ring is trying to sell their high end model at the same price, and I think they started at $500. Also important to me was hard-wired (vs wi-fi) and POE.
I ran Cat6 to the doorbell location, 48 inches above the entry deck level, which seems to be the generally accepted height for video doorbells. The electrician also ran 3-conductor to the doorbell location, and also to a doorbell location in the entry foyer area. In hindsight I should have also made a Cat6 run to the doorbell location.
The DoorBird comes with a fairly bulky female RJ45 to a connector that goes to the doorbell, about an inch by an inch, so if you want to use that you need to have room behind the sheathing for that, and if you have already blown insulation probably more trouble than it is worth. We have Cembonit siding at the doorbell location, furred out by an inch from the sheathing, but subs just left me a hole a bit bigger than the wires so no way to stuff the dongle in there without some siding surgery. So I just spliced in connectors to the Cat6, and I also hooked up the doorbell wires in case I want to try to use the NuTone bell my electrical sub put in.
I drilled holes in the Cembonit a bit bigger than some 2″ #8 wood screws and fastened the bracket to the sheathing, being careful not to torque down on the unsupported Cembonit. Drilling holes in the cement board is hard, they call out using a carbide tipped drill and I went to get a few of those to get the job done.
Here is the mounted doorbell. Patched it in to the switch and it fired right up. Download the DoorBird app to your smart phone and set up is pretty straight forward.
I also hooked up a DoorBird IP Door Chime, for now it is just hanging on the side of the equipment rack in the mechanical room. It is not very loud so probably can’t be too hidden away to be useful, and/or might need to get another one.
The smartphone app is pretty slick. Live video any time you like, and you can talk to a person at the door. The DoorBird people provide some level of free hosting of pictures and maybe video for free, if you want to keep more than that there is a paid plan. Or you can integrate this thing with a Synology NAS, which I will do for video storage (along with a couple of Hikvision cameras). As I said DoorBird’s API is open and there are a lot of integration options.