Guides
Independent research on smart home and home office products: what they do, where they fall short, and how to choose.
Ring renamed all of its doorbells in July and August 2026, so every comparison you can find is out of date. We put the eight current models side by side on chime, Wi-Fi band, battery, upload demand and what a plan adds, with a pick for each house: wired with a chime, wired without, no wiring.
Every standing desk product page leads with its maximum height. The minimum decides whether you can sit at it, and on seven of the desks we read it starts in the top 1.4 in (3.6 cm) of the guideline's seated range. Eight makers, one BIFMA guideline, one spare bedroom, and a pick for each problem.
A dual monitor arm is sold on its maximum. The minimum it needs, and the load your desk is rated for, are what decide whether it works. Three arms, one Dell monitor line and one IKEA tabletop, worked against each other, with a pick for each kind of desk.
The number on a CO2 meter is a ventilation gauge, not a toxicity reading. Where the 1,000 ppm figure came from, why the research on concentration disagrees with itself, and why a home office is the worst-ventilated room in the building.
Bias lighting products quote 6500K. The standard that figure comes from also specifies a ten-lux room, which is not the room you work in. What it says, when the strip does anything, and how it differs from the two lights it gets confused with.
Neither company will say it outright, so we went and checked both sides. What you get on Alexa instead, why Matter 1.5 quietly changed the picture in November 2025, and the three different questions people mean by "Ring and Google Nest".
Below freezing, a Ring doorbell stops charging on purpose, and that looks exactly like a dead battery. What each charging light means, what hardwiring and solar do, and why Ring will not tell you how long a battery lasts.
Start with a reconnect, not a reset: Ring lists the factory reset as the last resort. What separates a reboot from a power cycle and a factory reset, how to run the three checks in the right order, and the Device Health number that tells you a doorbell will keep dropping.
Cutting down Ring notifications goes faster in a set order: zone, then sensitivity, then Smart Alerts, then frequency. What each setting changes, which devices have which, and why Motion Warning is not a notification to you at all.
Ring's default is event clips, not continuous video. What a subscription adds, which devices can take the 24/7 Recording add-on and what it switches off, and how long each kind of footage survives.
One slow blue flash means a factory reset on some Ring doorbells and a normal boot-up on others. What each blue pattern signals, from charging to an active call, and the Chime and camera lights people mistake for the doorbell's.
There is no local storage inside a Ring camera and no cellular radio, so an offline minute is a minute with no record of it. What stops the moment Wi-Fi drops, what an Alarm Pro, Power over Ethernet and a phone hotspot each change, and what local storage does not.
Thirty feet (9 meters) of motion range is the figure Ring publishes, and it says nothing about whether you could recognize the person it recorded. Field of view per model, the distance where a face stops being identifiable, and what quietly shrinks both.
