Retrofit alarm susceptible to line noise, Zones not able to test, IOS app misbehaving

Products Ring Alarm
1

Hope somebody on the Ring team can comment

I just bought a Retrofit Alarm (directly from Amazon) to test and having many issues.

I’m trying to replace a DSC PC5010 that has been serving us well for over 22yrs. I’m on IOS15.61. Ring app 5.57.0 and device firmware says ‘up to date’. Base station works fine and is connected. It’ll respond to some activity

In general, nothing works well enough to use it

Here are my problems

  1. Zones cannot be consistently tested in the app during config . The continue tab doesn’t light up in the Zone settings’ ‘testing your connection’ . Random other zones enable themselves when I was trying to ‘test’ it , but the one I was testing could never enable itself. attempting to test other zones enabled the ones I tried unsuccessfully earlier.
  2. window open/close activity does not trigger the app, though the app does randomly send alert if I randomly touch any of the wire terminals with my finger. The unit does flash the led green if I open or close the zone otherwise.
  3. bench testing each zone with a 2K EOL resistor seems to work fine on random zone ports. Not all will work consistently IOS app alerts work but It does not work with my windows connected.
  4. unit seems very susceptible to noise on the zone terminals. I can see all zones blip to ‘ground’ if I randomly touch any other terminal.

My house uses 8 zones. Each zone has up to 7-8 windows wired in series ; each window run is about 50-75ft one-way, some much longer. All wired using standard 24AWG pairs. DCS box is wired with 5.6K EOL resistors as standard configuration. The system is solid and has never had any issues otherwise

I have substituted them with 1K and 2K EOL resistors; it makes no difference for the purposes of testing the retrofit alarm. Batteries are fresh from the box and measure 3.05V

I can’t attach scope pics, so here’s what I see on those 1mS pulses being driven on one zone rewired with a 2K EOL resistor
Open window: approx 250uS rise time , measured between 10-90% to 3V battery voltage
Closed window: approx 10uS rise time to160mV.
Note there’s measurable 150mVpp line noise with 20MHz bandwidth which is not surprising and is expected.

Please advise!

2

Hi @aaron31415. You can find all of the information we have regarding the Ring Alarm Retrofit Kit here. For further assistance outside of the content in our Help Center, I’d recommend following up with our support team at one of the numbers available here. The Ring Community is meant for more general questions since we do not have access to device details, so concerns with the Retrofit Kit are best handled with support for in-depth troubleshooting.