Interesting; I didn’t know you could set it to flash? I have tons of those switches.

They piss me off but I still purchased them. Only the detection portion of the device has a finite lifespan. So, if Nest, and now Google, actually cared about keeping electronic waste out of landfills they could have made the detection component modular and let us refresh just that part when it ages out, at perhaps $50 instead of tossing the whole thing. And, it will force you to toss it when it hits ten years, none of that old school smoke detector well it still seems to work stuff.

Second gripe is that while you can customize the alerts, you can only pick from their designated list of room names. In the app you can set your own desired name, but that’s only useful in a non-fire situation if you want to see on the app which alarm is actually going off. If it is a fire situation, and you happen to have a bedroom on different sides of the house, well, who knows which one is going off. There’s no playroom, theater, any type of hall other than “Hallway”, etc. I have a home with a great room in the middle and hallways + bedrooms on each side, so the “hallway” or “bedroom” going off could mean very different things.

Anyway, besides that, I greatly appreciate being able to monitor them remotely, being able to initiate a test of all of them at once from the app rather than climbing up a ladder over and over, the anti false alarm features, the night time path motion illumination, even the green ring when the lights go out to tell you they’re all still communicating with each other. That also is what lets me know the one in the home theater tends to lose communication every few weeks; need to contact Google about it one of these days.

I’ve got about 100 Lutron RadioRa2 devices and fifty or so Inovelli dimmers, plus another twenty random z wave and zigbee devices. Once a month when an Inovelli misbehaves in some way that requires me intervening for my wife or nine year old, I wish I’d just spent the money to go all Lutron, which has been rock solid for eight years.

I’m currently pretty happy with my Ring Pro 2 doorbell and iOS-based devices as the receiving side for button pushes at my front gate. I will say that it was hardly a good experience early on though, with the same exact issue you were seeing. Rings would come late, if the person was actually still standing there, interactive conversation was often impossible.

In my case it ended up being that the Ring seemed very finicky about staying connected to specific wifi configs, particularly newer wifi if I had most legacy speeds and protocols disabled. It won’t do 5ghz fyi. I’m a network engineer by trade and have a Cisco enterprise deployment at home, so coverage outside to the Ring was not an issue, but it sure hated staying reliably connected, or initiating the connection when someone pushed it.

So, what I ended up doing was hiding a tiny little MikroTik ‘mAP lite’ in my plastic irrigation controller box near by: https://mikrotik.com/product/RBmAPL-2nD

The mAP Lite is a 2.4ghz-only access point about the size of 2/3 of a credit card, and thickness of an RJ45, literally, since it had to be thick enough to accommodate the ethernet jack. It can be powered with PoE. It supports a huge variety of modes but I’m using it in a bridging config wired to wireless. It can still have an addressable interface on the bridged ethernet network, so I retain access to configure it even though it’s in bridge mode.

My irrigation box already had extra CAT5 in it home run to my wiring closet, as I’m using one of the wires for serial control from my home automation. So, all I needed to do was terminate one of the spare cables. Now I’ve got a tiny AP about ten feet from the Ring with wifi tailored just to it. I created a unique SSID that I joined it to, stuck it on its own vlan, and firewall rule lets it reach the internet. The wifi config on the Mikrotik that I found best serves the Ring was their “2Hz-only-G” band choice, channel width of 20 MHz, frequency of 2422 MHz. I’d initially left frequency to auto but it seemed to prefer one that would only achieve -74dB RSSI, but at 2422 it’s consistently locked in at -67 dB and goes to live view instantly, and my phone gets the push notices within a second or two. So, initially sucked, after some work it’s great.