Nest video doorbell first impressions + a surprise ending

After months of waiting and delays, the Nest Hello doorbell has finally arrived! Mine was delivered today. I was so excited that I left work, said I was going home for “lunch”, and installed it. Its a beauty, and at $229 this doorbell comes with lots of promises and potential. Lets find out if it lives up to the hype!

First — 10 seconds of helpful background info:

This is NOT the first video doorbell out on the market today. Ring — which just sold to Amazon — Skybell, Vivint, and others have had smart doorbells out on the market for years. This is google just finally get around to dipping their toes into this red-hot Smart Home segment.

Unboxing and Installation

As do all Nest and Apple products — the doorbell comes with some pretty amazing (expensive) packaging. Its beautiful. Mine also came with a Free Google Home Mini (all Nest Hello doorbells include this for free right now). Its a nice touch and will supposedly help the doorbell announce whos at the door, from the Home Mini speaker inside your home. Pretty cool.

The box includes the doorbell, a mounting plate, a wedge to angle the doorbell, mounting hardware, and a few other small items. Everything you need for the install, except a drill and screwdriver. Nest also repeatedly recommends that you hire a “Nest Pro” to install the doorbell for you. I decided to forgo the added expense and do the install myself. I am not a super DIY guy, but I was able to do the install in ~30 minutes. Not too hard, but things did get a little hairy when I was turning off the power at my circuit breaker, and then hooking up the contraption to my chime wires.

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This is my chime box after installing the contraption that helps make the chime work. The smaller your fingers, the better for this step.

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The final product. Apparently its a little crooked (so my wife tells me), but otherwise it looks great.

Also worth mentioning — this doorbell looks WAY more like a camera than the other popular video doorbells on the market (IMO). I previously had a Vivint doorbell, and I really liked how it was more inconspicuous: people would come over all the time (my wife’s friends, not mine) and they’d never know that it was recording them. It was fun to spy on people before. Now I suspect people will know they are being watched.

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Testing it out — what I like so far

1. The picture quality is really good. Its hard to tell what the resolution is, but I’d bet its about HD (720p). Crisp image with good high-dynamic-range (HDR). Its an important feature because doorbells often look into the sun or bright skies, and with it, the image won’t looked washed out.
2. It loads fast. When someone rings the doorbell, I get a notification within a couple of seconds, and then it loads on my phone (when I click on it) in a couple more seconds. Thats really fast, and fast enough to catch someone still at your door.
3. It works with your current doorbell chime. Now when the doorbell rings, not only will my phone get a notification but also I get a chime sound in the home.

4. Nest tells you how long its been since the doorbell was rung. This is a nice touch and a bold move. Nest doesn’t shy away from trying to hide potentially slow load times, and sees value in telling the user how long its been since the visitor came.

5. Two-way talk is available on the doorbell, and the speaker and microphone work great. Its a cool feature, but this is becoming par-for-the-course on video doorbells.

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6. Person/facial recognition seems to work pretty well. Nest is the first doorbell to pull this off. I tried it out, and on my first attempt it worked! It knew it was me. I even had my wife try it, and it got her name right too. Granted, we had already learned our faces and profiles into Nest with our other cameras, but it was still cool to see it work on the doorbell and leverage the learnings from my other cameras.

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What I DON’T like so far

1. An obvious camera. I mentioned this already, but I prefer my doorbell camera to blend in and be more conspicuous. This clearly looks like the device didn’t originate from my door.

2. The image seems a little dark. While the image looks pretty true to color, it just seems dark. Especially compared to my previous Vivint video doorbell (Nest is on the left, Vivint on the right).

3. The image is a little warped/curved. If you look at the Nest picture on the left, you can clearly see my right beam looks curved. I swear its straight in real life.

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Not sure yet

1. I am still not fully formed an opinion on the “auto responses” feature. I tried it once today with a delivery man and it spooked the daylights out of him. It worked like this: He came to my door to deliver a package. I got a notification and opened the app on my phone. While the delivery man was still standing there, I clicked on an auto response, “Leave it right there”. The doorbell voiced the command to him in a semi-robotic tone. He looked up at the camera, didn’t say a word, and then bolted. I’ll have to use the feature more to understand if its valuable or not — or just creepy.

Lastly, the (unfortunate) SURPRISE ENDING!!

I was feeling pretty cool with my new doorbell. I was even showing it off to all my friends (can I call them friends?) at work. Then all of a sudden — my doorbell stopped working. I got a notification from Nest saying that my doorbell was offline. I checked the app, and sure enough, OFFLINE.

“No worries”, I thought. I’m sure my Wi-Fi just dropped for a few minutes….

Then my wife got home.

“Something in the house smells really weird”, she texted me.

Great.

I came home to investigate. There was no power at the doorbell. None. Sure enough, my doorbell transformer (the little fuse box that powers the doorbell and is inconspicuously hidden somewhere in the furnace room) was blown. I guess the Nest doorbell was just too power hungry for my electrical wiring. My previous video doorbells worked (Ring, Vivint), but apparently my wiring is no match for Nest.

Next steps? Call out an electrician. Bummer.

So: a doorbell with a lot of promise but may blow your transformer. I’m still hopeful, but its an expensive hope.