Ring

Ring is the system that guards our house, and it has done so since November 2021. It started as an 8-piece alarm kit with a single camera at the front door. Today it is nine cameras — four outside covering the door, terrace, carport and caravan, five inside — plus contact sensors on every window and door that matters.

Four years is the only timescale worth judging a security system on, and it has taught us two things worth more than any spec sheet. The first is what works: the contact sensors have never produced a single false trigger, and not one camera has died, including the units we bought in 2021.

The second is what does not. The motion detectors that came in the original kit caused three false alarms, we never found out why, and they are now in a drawer. We replaced them with indoor cameras pointed at the basement windows — because when an alarm goes off at two in the morning, you do not want a sensor telling you *something moved*. You want to open the app and see whether anything is actually there. Since we removed them we have had zero false alarms.

We are honest about the trade. Ring is owned by Amazon, its relationship with US law enforcement has changed direction twice in two years, and that deserves a straight answer rather than a shrug — which is why our review covers it in full, and why the whole system also runs through Home Assistant in our house.

What keeps us on it is not the alarm. In four years we have never had a real security incident. What we have had, constantly, is the small reassurance of being able to check — the delivery driver at the door while you are away on holiday. That turns out to be worth more than the thing we actually bought it for.