Keypad WiFi Light Color

I have two keypads. The first is located in the same room as the base and its WiFi light is not illuminated (plugged in). The second is in the adjacent bedroom and it’s wifi light is illuminated yellow (plugged in). What’s the significance of this color? This bedroom also contains an alarm range extender.

Great question! The “network light” you see on the Keypad indicates how strong the Z-Wave signal is from Base Station to the Keypad. If the signal is good, this light will be green. If the signal is poor, this light will be yellow. In order to preserve battery and power usage, a green light will only appear for a short amount of time, whereas a yellow or red light will show constantly. I recommend double checking that the Alarm Extender is in a good range and communicating between the Base Station and Keypad.

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Thanks. Please advise recommended distance parameters for base station to keypad and then placement of extender between base stations and keypads.

Just some thoughts from my experience installing them and owning the system.

The range extender is terrible. Its range is maybe 20ft if there’s one wall in the way, and 40ft line of sight. Way less than rated. Also, in many home installs, the range extender I’ve found to be more trouble than it helps. The base has a significantly more powerful transmitter and receiver, and works at much greater distances. If the extender is placed into the mix where it’s essentially too close, it can actually make the signal worse, as the device might use the extender when the base signal is more reliable, but a few feet further away. Also, when updates occur and the paths are re-calculated, sometimes it might switch from the base to the extender, and now you’ve got a yellow light for a few days until it decides to re-map again and use the base again.

So if you’re having intermittent yellow connection light on the keypad, maybe try removing the extender for a few days to see if it improves/stabilizes, and also to ensure it doesn’t make any other sensors worse. I’d try this when you’re going to be around for a while, just to be sure, as you don’t want a sensor to drop offline while it’s set and you’re away. But in the two dozen or so Ring Alarms I’ve installed, I’ve only needed the extender on two. After the same issue with the intermittent yellow connection light on the first handful I installed, I removed the extenders and have had no issues since. Now these houses are all at most 3000ft² and on one two three levels. The only two I’ve needed to use the extenders were both 3k ft² single story with long distance between ends of the house, and I located the extenders about 80% of the way between the base and sensors that needed a signal boost, with the extender closer to the sensor, farther from the base. 50/50 didn’t cut it.

Anyway, just my thoughts on the extenders and placement. Ring really needs a v2 extender that is actually good. Or make the keypad act as a node when powered, like powered Z-wave devices are supposed to work, but that’s a different story…

Also, the user being able to see the Z-wave network status and map of the hops would be so amazing. And to be able to manually trigger a HEAL command would be nice too. Having to call Ring for that basic info is frustrating.

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I have the same problem. if the range extender is more than 10ft away it says low signal…