Nest Doorbell (Battery) and HomeKit Starling Home Hub interaction

[PaulK]

Isolated why my hardwired Nest Doorbell (Battery) failed to maintain a charge.  After replacing both the Nest Doorbell and the doorbell transformer, my excessive battery drain was caused by interfacing the doorbell to HomeKit with the Starling Home Hub. One I removed the Nest Doorbell from the Starling Home Hub configuration the battery percentage has continuously increased and no longer requires external charging.

[firmwaredev · Accepted solution]

I presume that Homekit is pulling video frequently (or even constantly).   That's unfortunately a no-go for the Nest Doorbell (battery).   It only trickle charges the battery.  It can't run off of the doorbell A/C only.  The design assumption for this model was that the duty cycle would be low enough for that low charging rate to keep up with demand.  If pulling video frequently, as the Homekit likely does, that balance goes too much into the negative, and it will drain to zero without external charging.

This recently created support page for this doorbell is primarily about its cold weather performance, but as you can see, it also mentions that it only trickle charges in all circumstances and temperatures.  As such, it is effectively a battery doorbell, and has all the same limitations one would expect.

https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/11830989?hl=en

[PaulK]

Thanks for your inciteful comments. The purpose of my post was simply to alert others to the battery drain caused by interfacing the Nest Doorbell (Battery) to HomeKit which in my case was done via the Starlink Home Hub. Your comments tell us why such a configuration is a no-go. 

[Brad]

Hey folks,

Thanks for visiting the Community. Since this thread hasn't had activity in a while, we're going to close it to keep content fresh.

We hope you were able to get the help you need, but if you're still having trouble, please feel free to submit another post, and provide as many details as possible so that others can lend a hand. Hope this helps!

Best regards,

Brad.