Does the Ring Video Doorbell really need 8 to 24 VAC? Seems not as DC works on mine!

My Ring video doorbell has been sitting on 0% to 4% charge the last week so I thought I’d look at replacing the 19VAC charger, which was difficult to source originally. But after a bit of searching, I saw many asking whether it could not just use a DC charger as they are super easy, and cheaper, to procure.

The Ring Video Doorbell website and all manuals state to hardwire it you should use 8 to 24V AC depending on the model to a max draw of 40VA (about 2A at 24V), and also all a smoothing resistor as well. It seems all of this is some hang over from using existing old, wired doorbell cabling that is already in place. Nowhere does Ring mention anything at all about DC being an alternative.

One commenter was mentioning that in fact if you applied DC to it, it would just use the one side of the AC input circuitry, and it should pass that DC straight through. So, I thought DC is really easy and cheaper to get, maybe I’ll try this this and see.

I bought a 24V DC charger, to also allow for a bit of voltage drop from the house to the outdoor gate and removed that smoothing resistor to wire it straight through to the device. Polarity should not really matter as AC peaks on both sides. I connected it and the device showed hardwired (it has the battery inside still). But I left it overnight and in the morning the battery was showing 100% charge. See the image following for the Home Assistant entity monitoring for my doorbell battery charge percentage.

Home Assistant doorbell battery charge level

It is worth noting that the battery charges to 100% then the device seems to stop charging and allows the battery to run the device until it drops to 85% or 90% and then recharge. So, it won’t necessarily stay on 100% all the time if it is hardwired.

The featured image in this post shows a screenshot inside the Ring app which is showing the status is hardwired. Everything is looking good though and I’ll monitor it closely for a few days still. But if this is correct, I don’t know why Ring does not state you can actually use a DC charger as well with your Ring Video Doorbell. AC chargers are really not that easy to always find.