How to Avoid Accidental Motion Triggers on Your Ring Doorbell

Have you ever been bothered by annoying accidental motion alerts on your Ring doorbell? Fortunately, there are a number of things you can do to cut down on these motion alerts---while still keeping your doorbell fully functional.

The Problem: Too Many Motion Alerts

If you have a Ring doorbell camera (and have it installed properly), you know that it alerts you when someone presses the doorbell button and when it detects motion in front of the doorbell. The problem arises when the doorbell's motion detector is too sensitive and keeps alerting for things you don't need to know about.

These accidental motion alerts can be annoying at best and, at worst, like the little boy who cried wolf---if you get too many of them you'll start ignoring them. To fix this problem, it helps to know how motion detection works on your Ring doorbell.

Once you understand that, you'll be able to avoid your Ring doorbell accidentally detecting motion.

Solution 1: Configure the Motion Detection Frequency

If someone or something keeps moving in front of your Ring doorbell, it may set off the motion detector over and over again, which is extremely annoying. Consider the scenario of kids playing in your front yard, and running through your doorbell's motion detector zone, causing a never-ending series of motion alert chimes. It's okay to get alerted once if kids are playing in your front yard, but you don't want to be continuously alerted to that fact.

Read more: Has Your Ring Doorbell Gone Offline? How to Identify and Fix the Problem

The solution to this problem is to configure your doorbell to check for motion less frequently. Your Ring doorbell lets you check for motion Frequently (always on and checking), Regularly (takes a short break after each motion alert), or Periodically (takes a longer break after each motion alert). Here's how to configure this setting.

Solution 2: Set a Schedule to Stop Motion Alerts at Specific Times

Maybe you're OK with getting motion alerts while you're awake but don't want to be disturbed by random alerts while you're sleeping. The solution to this situation is a set a schedule that mutes motion alerts during a specified time period. This way you won't get woken up when a stray leaf blows across your doorstep at 2am.

Here's how to set a motion alert schedule:

Solution 3: Snooze Motion Detection for a Set Period

If you don't want to set a regular motion detection schedule, you can opt to snooze motion detection for a set period of time. This is useful if you don't want to be disturbed by motion alerts during an important video meeting or if your toddler is taking a nap.

Related: Is Your Ring Doorbell Invading Other People's Privacy?

To temporarily snooze motion detection:

Solution 4: Configure Smart Alerts to Detect Only People

Ring's motion detection is fairly intelligent, It can determine, with some degree of accuracy, whether the motion is caused by a person or by something else. You can configure what Ring calls Smart Alerts to chime or record when it detects motion from a person or some other type of motion. You may, for example, want to enable person alerts but disable alerts for other motion.

Here's how to configure Smart Alerts on your Ring doorbell:

Solution 5: Configure Motion Sensitivity

Your Ring doorbell's motion detector can be tweaked to be more or less sensitive. Making it more sensitive will catch every little motion but can also trigger more false alarms. Making it less sensitive will reduce accidental triggers but could also cause it to miss some real incidents. This is a setting you may want to play with to get just right for your situation. Here's how to do it:

Solution 6: Configure Motion Zones

Perhaps the best way to deal with annoying accidental motion detection triggers is to configure your doorbell's motion zones. This lets you fine-tune how wide and how far motion is detected. For example, you can narrow the width of the motion detector to avoid areas to the side with heavy foot traffic or shorten the range so that it doesn't detect passing cars or trucks on the street.

Motion zones are part of your Ring doorbell's Advanced Motion Detection feature. There are two types of motion zones available, depending on whether your Ring doorbell is wired or battery-operated. Battery-operated doorbells have what Ring calls adjustable motion zones. Wired doorbells have customizable motion zones that offer a bit more flexibility in their positioning.

To configure motion zones you first have to activate Advanced Motion Detection, which you do from the Advanced Settings screen in the Ring app. You can then follow these steps to configure motion zones:

The Result: No More Ring False Alarms

Accidental motion alerts are an annoying byproduct of your Ring doorbell's motion detector. Fortunately, you can configure when and what types of motion alerts you receive, and adjust the size of the zone where motion is detected. By following the solutions outlined here, you should stop those annoying accidental motion triggers.

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