Door Bell Wiring

A doorbell is not the most sophisticated technology there is. In fact, many science experiments for youngsters are no more sophisticated than the switch or button, the wiring and a chime that rings when the circuit is completed. And yet, despite the fact that we are living in an age where advances in technology are changing everything from how we watch TV to how we wash our clothes, the doorbell continues to remain fundamentally unchanged.

Of course, there are advanced units that you can purchase to perform the very basic function of allowing guests to make a chime go off in the house so they don't have to hurt their knuckles knocking on your door. But by and large, most doorbells are the very basic plan of one button, a few yards of wiring and a chime. And this design will no doubt endure simply because of the old adage, "if its not broke, don't fix it".

When that simple device stops working, its good to remember that there are just those three components to any functional doorbell system. And in the majority of the cases, the flaw in the system is with the button or with the chimes themselves, both of which are self-contained units that can be removed and replaced easily and with very little expense. In fact, there isn't much good to be had calling in an electrician to fix your doorbell. It is a DYI job if there ever was one.

Probably the one place to focus your energies if your doorbell needs attention is the button on the ball on your front porch. After all, this is the only part of the doorbell mechanism that has any interaction with people or any real moving parts. It is easy and cheap enough to just buy a new doorbell button and swap it out. You don't need any specialized education and you can pretty much see how to do it by just taking the old doorbell off and studying how you removed it and putting the new one on that way.

Before you go out and buy a new button, open the old one up and clean and tighten everything. You will find lots of "dust bunnies" in there that may be the source of the problem. So you may be able to get the doorbell working pretty easily by simply tuning put the old button mechanism. Now the chimes will not be the unit that fails most often. But if they do stop working, like the button, they are easy enough to buy at any big hardware store and to swap out with little more than the removal and attachment of two wires and securing the chime box to the wall where the old one came down.

If the wiring is the problem, the only real possibility is that something inside the walls damaged the wire housing such as a mouse. But pulling the old wiring out and putting in new is not an easy task. You can attach the new wiring to the old and pull it through the tunnel where the old wring lives. But since the original wiring was probably put in when the house was built, you have no idea what you are going to hang up on doing that. So give it a try keeping in mind that if all else fails, you can always go to a wireless unit and bypass the old wring entirely.