u/Decweb

Speaking with a Ring support representative, they told me that it is possible to have multiple base stations at a single postal address by using some feature that associates base stations with "buildings", so that there's a Building #1, Building #2 type of setup and each can have a base station, and each building/base-station can be the same postal address.

I can't seem to figure this out from the phone app or the web portal. Has anybody out there done this?

The representative cautioned me that they would likely require multiple monitoring plans.

I had hoped to try an old style smoke alarm listener, but they are no longer made. The new version says it requires the Sidewalk capability, and isn't available yet (and dates just slipped by 5 weeks). This has been previously discussed elsewhere to some degree.

I called the support phone number and eventually got a human being after the horrible LLM chatbot pretending to be a person. Here were some takeaways I got which may or may not be accurate and I have not done further research (yet). If I understand correctly, the support representative made the following claims:

• Sidewalk devices will not work as zwave devices or talk to the base station except possibly for exceptions in the next bullet(??).
• Some doorbell/camera combinations are what implement the Sidewalk support These, I think. So if you live in the woods where nobody else is around, this may or may not be a way to add Sidewalk to your home. It isn't clear to me if they just talk to wifi or if they also talk to base stations, perhaps somebody knows.
• There are some Amazon devices, supposedly Amazon Echo being one of them, that implement Sidewalk support. I'm thinking that if I can put these on on my home network, I can support and maybe even extend range to Sidewalk compatible devices. The support representative seemed supportive of this idea. (Language and phone quality barriers apply to the support call).

Perhaps others know more about this and can provide more information, mostly I have questions at this time. Is it the case that a device is either zwave or sidewalk, but not both, for the sidewalk compatible devices?

I have the z-wave smoke detectors that talk directly to the ring base station.

However when I press the TEST button on the smoke detectors, it doesn't trigger any alarm on the ring base station?

How can I know that ring will correctly trigger its own alarm (in addition to the smoke detector's own alarm) in the event of a fire/smoke condition?

I'm aware I can press the base station alarm test button in the app, but that isn't at all the same thing.