DEV Community: Xing

Is Smart Home Automation Worth It?

Xing — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 18:49:39 +0000

It depends entirely on whether you are solving a problem or collecting capability. Those two cost the same and deliver very differently.

What reliably pays back

Lighting and scheduling. A switch that turns the porch light on at dusk and off at bedtime removes a small daily friction forever. This is the highest return per dollar in the whole category, and it keeps working when the internet is down because the schedule lives on the device.

Remote awareness. A doorbell or camera you can check from bed or from work solves a recurring anxiety. The value is not the resolution, it is not having to get up.

Loads that actually cost money. Water heaters, floor heating and pool pumps on a schedule or thermostat genuinely reduce consumption, because the waste in those systems is almost always timing rather than efficiency.

What usually does not

Voice control for everything. Speaking a command is slower than pressing a switch for anything you do more than twice a day.

Elaborate scenes. The good morning scene that closes blinds, starts music and brews coffee gets used for about two weeks and then quietly dies.

Gadget density. Every extra device is another app, another firmware, another thing that stops working when a vendor sunsets a product line. I have watched customers buy forty devices and use six.

The cost nobody quotes

Configuration and maintenance. Hardware is a one-time cost. Re-pairing a device after a router change, re-calibrating a feeder after a food change, updating firmware across twelve devices, that is ongoing. Budget attention, not just money.

Where I would start

Two or three things that remove a daily annoyance. A porch light, a doorbell, one thermostat. Live with those for a month. If you find yourself wanting more you will know exactly what you want, which is a much cheaper route to a good setup than buying a hub and forty devices.

Full disclosure: I work on the manufacturing side of this, so I sell into this category and I am not neutral. If it is useful, our range is at https://www.xingliaotech.com/ and the retail side at https://www.xingliaoshop.com/

Xingliao Smart Home builds smart switches, video doorbells and security cameras on Tuya WiFi and Tuya ZigBee, and runs OEM/ODM programmes from Shenzhen. Factory and ODM capability.

Can You Install a Doorbell Camera in a Rental?

Xing — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 18:49:26 +0000

Two different things are being mixed together here, and separating them changes what you should do. There is "is it illegal", which is almost always no — putting a camera on your own front door is not a criminal matter anywhere I know of. And there is "does it breach my lease", which, if the lease says no and you do it anyway, it does, and the remedies available to a landlord range from a cure notice to terminating the tenancy depending on where you live and how your lease is written. That is not legal advice, just the distinction worth being clear about, because people lose sight of it in both directions.

So the practical question is not whether you can get away with it. It is whether there is a version of this that gives you what you want without putting your tenancy at risk, and there often is.

Read what the lease actually prohibits before assuming it covers everything. Most clauses of this kind are aimed at alterations and fixtures: drilling, screwing, replacing hardware, running wires, anything that changes the door or leaves a mark. What they are usually reacting to is damage and liability, not electronics as such. A device that attaches without any of that sits in a genuinely different category, and this is worth raising rather than assuming.

Ask, in writing, and make it easy to say yes. Property managers refuse these requests most often because saying yes feels like accepting liability for something they have not assessed. A short message that states the specifics — nothing is drilled or screwed, nothing is wired, the original peephole and hardware stay in place and get refitted when you leave, the camera is aimed only at your own threshold and not at neighbouring doors, audio recording is off, footage is stored locally rather than on a third party's servers — removes most of the reason to refuse. Ask for it as a written accommodation if you are requesting anything on accessibility or safety grounds, because in many jurisdictions a documented request has to be considered rather than simply declined. Get the answer in writing and keep it.

If the answer is still no, there are options that most people overlook.

A peephole viewer with no recording at all is usually not covered by anything, because it is not a device in the sense these clauses contemplate. It is just a better look at who knocked.

An indoor camera looking at your own hallway from inside your unit generally does not touch the door fabric at all, and in many buildings that distinction matters to whoever is enforcing the rule. It will not see the person outside before they knock, but it does cover the door once opened, and packages just inside the threshold.

If your door has a glazed panel or a sidelight, a camera mounted inside pointing out through glass works surprisingly well with a bit of care about reflections, and involves nothing attached to the exterior.

And if it is really about knowing when someone comes while you are away rather than seeing faces, a door contact sensor that logs opens and closes is cheap, attaches with adhesive, and rarely falls foul of anything.

The people who get into trouble are usually the ones who mount something on the exterior and assume no one will notice. In most buildings someone does notice, and the conversation afterwards goes much worse than the one you could have had beforehand.

One practical note if you do end up installing anything, because it is the failure I see most often and it has nothing to do with rules: the Wi-Fi signal at an apartment entrance door is frequently terrible. Fire-rated steel doors attenuate signal badly, and routers tend to sit at the far end of the unit. Test at the door with a Wi-Fi analyser and look at the actual signal strength rather than the bars. Below roughly -65 dBm you should expect dropouts and missed recordings, which rather defeats the point of fitting it. A mesh node nearer the hallway, or placing the unit's own chime on a socket closer to the door, usually fixes it. Also check whether local card recording works without an account, because some models have a card slot but write nothing until you register one.

I work on the manufacturing side, so I have a bias toward the variants that leave no trace on someone else's door — partly because that is what I would want as a landlord, and partly because the deposit argument is not one you can win afterwards.

If you are comparing hardware rather than deciding for yourself, this is the range worth looking at for renter-friendly options: https://xingliaoshop.com/product-category/smart-video-doorbell/

Xingliao Smart Home builds smart switches, video doorbells and security cameras on Tuya WiFi and Tuya ZigBee, and runs OEM/ODM programmes from Shenzhen. Factory and ODM capability.

Are Smart Plugs Worth It?

Xing — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 18:44:08 +0000

Usually yes, but not for the reason most people buy them.

Remote on/off is a party trick. You will use it twice and then forget it exists. The three things a smart plug actually does well are different:

It gives a schedule to an appliance that never had one. A space heater, a coffee machine, a fish tank light, Christmas lights. None of those are "smart", and none of them need to be. The plug carries the intelligence and the dumb appliance just obeys.
It measures. A plug with energy monitoring will tell you which device is quietly costing you money. I have seen people discover an old beverage fridge in the garage eating more than their lighting.
It turns a switch nobody walks to into something you can control. The plug behind the sofa, the one under the desk, the one in the holiday flat you visit twice a year.

Two things to check before you buy, because this is where cheap plugs quietly fail:

Rated current. Most plugs are 10 A or 16 A. A 10 A plug on a 2000 W heater is running at the edge continuously, and that is how you get a warm plug and eventually a welded relay. Resistive loads like heaters, kettles, irons and ovens deserve a 16 A part and a brand that publishes the rating. This is not the place to save three dollars.

Power-on state after a power cut. This is the single most underrated spec. When mains power returns, does the plug come back ON, or does it stay OFF until the app tells it otherwise? If you are using it for a heater or a pump, you need to decide which behaviour you want, and you need the plug to let you choose. Cheap units hard-code one behaviour and do not tell you which.

Where they are genuinely a bad idea:

Anything that must never lose power. A freezer, an aquarium pump, a sump pump, a CPAP machine. You are putting a relay and a Wi-Fi chip between the mains and something that fails badly when interrupted.

Anything that needs a clean shutdown. Hard-cutting power to a desktop PC or a NAS every night is a slow way to corrupt a filesystem. A TV is fine; a computer is not.

Anything already smart. If the device has its own app and its own scheduling, the plug adds a second point of failure for no benefit.

One honest trade-off worth knowing. A Wi-Fi plug talks to a cloud server. When that server has a bad day, your schedule stops. A ZigBee plug runs locally through a hub, so it keeps working when the internet is out, but it needs that hub. If you only have two plugs, Wi-Fi is fine. If you are building toward twenty devices, the hub starts paying for itself.

I work on the manufacturing side of this, so I carry a bias: I think the useful part of smart home is scheduling and measurement, not voice control. But that is also why I would tell you to skip the plug for the freezer and spend the money on a properly rated one for the heater.

If you are sourcing these rather than buying two for your own flat, the spec sheet that matters is relay rating, power-on behaviour, and which app ecosystem the module is certified for. We build Tuya-compatible plugs and wall sockets, and the catalogue is here if it helps: https://xingliaoshop.com/product-category/smart-socket/

Xingliao Smart Home builds smart switches, video doorbells and security cameras on Tuya WiFi and Tuya ZigBee, and runs OEM/ODM programmes from Shenzhen. Factory and ODM capability.

Does a Video Doorbell Work Without Internet?

Xing — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 18:43:55 +0000

Short answer: you can mount it, but you cannot use it.

What works without internet at the door

The mechanical part. Drill the bracket, mount it, wire it or charge it. None of that needs a connection.

What breaks immediately

Setup itself. The pairing flow happens in the app, the app talks to the doorbell over your home WiFi, and account creation is cloud-side. You can do that part from a phone on mobile data somewhere else, but the doorbell will not join a network that does not exist.

Then everything you bought it for:

Live view. Needs the camera to reach the internet and your phone to reach the camera through its cloud relay.
Motion notifications. Detection runs on the device on some models, but the notification path is cloud.
Recording and history. Stored remotely by design. No connection means no history, and on most models there is no local fallback at all.
Two-way talk. Same relay problem.

The one case that half-works

If a camera writes to a local SD card or an NVR, you keep footage during an outage. Ring's own models mostly do not do this, which is the single most common complaint after an ISP outage, and the reason people end up moving to PoE NVR systems.

What I would do differently

If internet at the property is genuinely unavailable or unreliable, a wired PoE camera into a local recorder is the honest answer. It costs more to install and it keeps working when the internet does not.

Full disclosure: I work on the manufacturing side and we build video doorbells, so I am not a neutral party here. Our units are Tuya-based and carry the same cloud dependency, which is exactly why I would not pretend otherwise. Spec sheet at https://www.xingliaoshop.com/product-category/smart-video-doorbell/

Xingliao Smart Home builds smart switches, video doorbells and security cameras on Tuya WiFi and Tuya ZigBee, and runs OEM/ODM programmes from Shenzhen. Factory and ODM capability.

One Cat Is Skinny, the Other Is Getting Fat: What Actually Works

Xing — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 18:38:35 +0000

Free feeding is the thing to stop first, and it is almost certainly what is making the gap wider. A bowl that is always full does not feed two cats equally — it feeds whichever cat is willing to defend it. The confident cat eats on its own schedule and often eats more than its share, the cautious cat eats when nobody is watching and eats less. Same bowl, same food, two completely different actual intakes. That is why one is getting fat and the other is not, even though you are buying the right portions.

Before anything about equipment: take the fat cat to the vet and get a target calorie number rather than guessing. This matters more with cats than with almost any other animal. A cat that loses weight too quickly, or a cat that stops eating for a day or two, can develop hepatic lipidosis — fat mobilising into the liver faster than it can be processed. It is genuinely dangerous and it is the reason you never simply halve a cat's food overnight. A vet visit also rules out the boring causes first: thyroid, insulin issues, a food that does not agree with them. Get a daily calorie figure and a target weight, and work towards it over months, not weeks.

Once you have that number, the problem becomes mechanical rather than medical, and it breaks into two separate problems that need two separate fixes.

The first problem is who eats how much. Separate meals in separate rooms, with the door shut for twenty minutes, solves this completely and costs nothing. It is tedious twice a day and it works. If that is sustainable for you, stop reading here — nothing you can buy does it better.

If it is not sustainable, which is most households, you need portion control that is tied to a specific cat rather than to a food station. That is the honest dividing line between feeder types. A standard timed feeder just makes food appear at a set time; whichever cat gets there first eats, and if that cat is the fast one you have made the problem worse. A microchip or RFID feeder only opens for the cat whose collar tag or implanted chip matches, so the fat cat can be locked out of the thin cat's food entirely, and the thin cat can be given a richer diet without the other one stealing it. That is the single feature worth paying a premium for in a multi-cat house, and it is the only one that actually solves selective feeding rather than managing it.

Two caveats if you go that way. Collar tags get lost, and a cat that loses its tag cannot open its own feeder — keep a spare and check the fit. And these feeders are not instant: most cats need a few days of supervised introduction, usually starting with the lid held open, before they trust the thing. Also worth knowing that a determined cat can still learn to pull food out of a partially open bowl, so the lid mechanism matters more than the marketing suggests.

The second problem is meal size and speed, which is independent of who eats. Switching the fat cat from dry to wet is often the largest single lever available, and it has nothing to do with feeders: wet food is roughly 70 to 80 percent water, so the same number of calories occupies far more volume and the cat feels fuller. Dry food is calorie-dense by comparison, and free-feeding dry is the classic way to produce a fat cat. If the thin cat needs the extra calories, the two of you can simply be on different diets once you have selective access sorted.

Slowing down the fast eater is the other half. A slow feeder bowl or a puzzle feeder turns a forty-second meal into a ten-minute one, and cats that forage do not beg as hard afterwards. This helps the thin cat too, because the fat cat stops finishing its own meal and then moving on to the second bowl.

The part that makes any of this work is measurement, and it is the part people skip. Weigh both cats weekly on a baby scale or by weighing yourself while holding them, and log it. Learn the body condition score rather than trusting the number on the scale — you should be able to feel ribs easily with a light touch and see a waist from above. Aim for slow, boring progress: a fraction of a percent of body weight per week. Any plan that produces rapid loss is a plan to stop.

One thing I would flag as a common mistake: buying a timed feeder, setting it to four small meals, and assuming the problem is solved. If both cats can reach it, you have built an all-you-can-eat window for the fast one. The feeder only helps if it is either selective per cat, or positioned so that only one cat can use it.

Practical sequence that usually works: vet visit for calorie targets; stop free feeding entirely; feed measured wet meals twice a day in the same place; if the fat cat still steals, move to separate rooms; if separate rooms are not realistic, get a selective feeder for the thin cat so its food is protected; slow bowls for whoever bolts their food; weigh weekly and adjust slowly.

I work on the manufacturing side of pet feeders, so I will say plainly that a feeder is not the first answer here — scheduling and vet guidance are. Selective-access feeders are genuinely useful, but only in the specific situation where one cat is blocking another from eating, which is exactly the situation you have described. If it helps to see what exists: https://xingliaoshop.com/pet-feeder/

Xingliao Smart Home builds smart switches, video doorbells and security cameras on Tuya WiFi and Tuya ZigBee, and runs OEM/ODM programmes from Shenzhen. Factory and ODM capability.

Who Are the Leading Smart Security Device Manufacturers?

Xing — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 18:38:22 +0000

Split the question in two, because the answers differ.

"Who makes them" - fewer companies than the market suggests. Most names you see on a shelf are brand owners, not factories. They specify a product, pick a firmware skin, and contract the build. The actual manufacturing sits with a much smaller group of firms in Shenzhen, Dongguan and Ningbo, most of which you will never see advertised, because they sell through the same channels their own buyers do.

"Where to find them" - in rough order of how much signal you get per hour spent.

Trade shows. Canton Fair in April and October, the Hong Kong Electronics Fair, CES for anything that wants a US story. Still the highest-signal option, because you can put hands on the product and ask the engineer a question the sales person cannot answer.
Platform listings, but read them differently. Alibaba, Made-in-China and Global Sources are useful for mapping who is active in a category, not for judging who is good. A gold supplier badge is a subscription, not an audit.
Certification databases. If a product claims FCC or CE, the filing is public and it lists the applicant. That is often the fastest way to find out who actually built a device you already own and like. Take the FCC ID off the label and look it up.
Your own supply chain. If you already sell a category, the factory that makes your current product usually makes three adjacent ones.

What separates a real manufacturer from a rep:

They own the tooling, and will tell you the tooling cost and lead time without being asked twice.
They can change firmware behaviour, not just print a logo on the same board.
They quote MOQ by model and by colour separately, because those are genuinely different costs.
They send a sample before asking for a purchase order, and the sample is not the best unit they have ever made.

Red flags: a company that will not name the factory city, one that quotes the same lead time for 500 and 50,000 units, and one whose factory audit is a photo album.

Full disclosure: I work on the manufacturing side of this, at a Shenzhen firm building Tuya-based video doorbells, smart switches, security cameras and pet devices, so I am not a neutral party here. If it is useful, the range and the certification list are at https://www.xingliaotech.com/ . And if you are comparing suppliers, ask the tooling question early. It sorts faster than any badge.

Xingliao Smart Home builds smart switches, video doorbells and security cameras on Tuya WiFi and Tuya ZigBee, and runs OEM/ODM programmes from Shenzhen. Factory and ODM capability.

Smart Locks vs Regular Locks: Is the Upgrade Worth It?

Xing — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 18:33:04 +0000

It is better at one specific thing, and roughly equivalent or sometimes worse at the thing most people assume.

What a keypad actually solves

Key distribution. That is the real win. You stop carrying metal, you stop cutting copies for the cleaner, and you revoke access by changing a code instead of changing a cylinder. If you run a rental, a listing with rotating guest codes, or a shared office, this is a genuine operational upgrade and it pays for itself on the first lockout you do not have to attend.

What it does not solve

The cylinder. A keypad lock is still a mechanical lock with an electronic handle. If the deadbolt is a cheap pin tumbler it can be bumped or picked exactly as before, and the keypad adds nothing to that. The rating that matters is on the cylinder and the strike plate, not in the app.

New failure modes you did not have before

Battery. A mechanical lock never needs charging. Know where the emergency power tap is before you install it, not during the first flat battery.
Code sharing. A shared code stops being a credential the moment more than two people know it, and most locks cannot tell you who used which code.
Shoulder surfing. A four digit code in a shared lobby is observable.
Network surface. Anything with WiFi or Bluetooth is a device on your network running firmware that will age. Local-only Bluetooth is a much smaller target than a cloud-dependent lock.

When a plain lock is the better answer

One household, low turnover, a door you use twice a day. A good mechanical lock with three keys costs less, lasts longer, and has no failure mode you have to manage.

Where I would actually spend the money

On the strike plate and the cylinder, not on the electronics. A smart lock on a softwood door held by a short strike screw is theatre.

Full disclosure: I work on the manufacturing side and we build smart locks among other things, so read this with that in mind. If it is useful, the cylinder and certification detail for what we build is at https://www.xingliaoshop.com/product-category/smart-door-lock/

Xingliao Smart Home builds smart switches, video doorbells and security cameras on Tuya WiFi and Tuya ZigBee, and runs OEM/ODM programmes from Shenzhen. Factory and ODM capability.

Why Do LED Bulbs Glow Dimly When the Power Is Off?

Xing — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 18:32:50 +0000

Short answer: in most cases it is harmless and costs you almost nothing in electricity, but there is one version of it that you should fix, because it means the fitting is live even when the switch is off. Here is how to tell which one you have.

There are four mechanisms that produce a dim glow from an LED lamp that is supposed to be off, and they have completely different implications.

The first is switched neutral. In a lot of older installations the switch breaks the neutral conductor instead of the live one. The lamp is then connected to live permanently, and it only stops glowing because the return path is interrupted. With an incandescent bulb you would never notice. With an LED you often get a faint glow, because the live conductor running to the fitting couples capacitively to anything nearby, and that is enough to push a fraction of a milliamp through the driver. If this is your situation, the fitting is live at all times, which matters the moment someone changes a bulb or touches the terminals. This is the one worth getting an electrician to correct, and it is a ten minute job if the cables allow it.

The second, and by far the most common in houses that have been upgraded, is standby leakage through a smart switch. A switch that has no neutral at the box has to power itself somehow, and the only place it can take energy from is the tiny current that flows through the lamp. With an old filament bulb that current did nothing you could see. An LED needs so little energy that the same leakage is enough to make it glow or, worse, blink every few seconds. This is not dangerous and it does not damage the lamp, but it is genuinely annoying, and it is the single most common complaint about no-neutral smart switches.

The third is capacitive coupling between cables. If the cable feeding the light runs alongside another live circuit for several metres in the same conduit or trunking, you get the same effect without any smart switch involved at all: a few tens of volts of induced potential, no real current behind it, but enough to light an LED faintly. Long runs to a garage or an outbuilding are the classic case.

The fourth is a switch with a built-in indicator lamp or a neon locator. Those deliberately pass a small current through the load to light the indicator, which again was invisible with old bulbs and very visible with LEDs.

Working out which one you have is quick. Turn the light off and look at it for a full minute in a dark room. If it is a steady faint glow, suspect switched neutral, coupling, or an indicator. If it pulses or blinks periodically, suspect a smart switch's standby circuit charging and discharging. Then, if you are comfortable doing so safely, switch off at the consumer unit, remove the switch plate, and disconnect the switched conductor. If the lamp still glows with the switch entirely out of circuit, the cause is coupling or switched neutral rather than the switch itself. Anything involving measuring voltage at the fitting should be done with the breaker off and confirmed dead first, and if any of that is unclear, this is exactly the point where an electrician is cheaper than a mistake.

The fixes, in the order I would try them:

If the switch is breaking neutral, have it rewired so it breaks live. No product solves this properly, because the problem is which conductor is being interrupted, not what is doing the interrupting.

If it is a no-neutral smart switch, the clean fix is to move to a switch that has a real neutral available, which powers itself properly and stops leaking through the lamp. If there is no neutral in the box, the next best thing is a capacitor module fitted across the lamp terminals, which gives the leakage current somewhere to go other than through the LED. It needs to be a properly rated X2 class part, fitted by someone who knows what they are doing. The third option is to buy a lamp whose driver has a bleeder circuit, which simply stops it responding to such small currents. Some do, and it is not written on the packaging, so you end up trying one.

If it is coupling on a long run, the capacitor module works there too, and so does reducing how far the lighting cable runs parallel to a live circuit.

What I would not do: fit a resistor across the lamp to soak up the current, because it dissipates heat in a ceiling void or a fitting for no good reason, and do not ignore it on the assumption that it must be fine.

On the safety question specifically: a glow caused by leakage or coupling is real but tiny, typically a fraction of a milliamp at a few tens of volts. It is not a fire risk, it does not meaningfully shorten the lamp's life, and the energy involved is far below what your meter can register. The reason not to ignore it is not the glow itself, it is that one of the possible causes means the fitting is live when you think it is not.

I work on the manufacturing side of smart switches, so I see this from the other end: it is the most returned-with-a-complaint behaviour of any no-neutral design, and the honest answer is that it is inherent to powering a device from the load. The designs that handle it best either require a neutral or specify a leakage current low enough that most lamps simply do not react. If a seller cannot tell you what their switch's standby leakage is, that is usually a sign nobody measured it.

If it helps to see what is on the market, our switch range is here: https://xingliaoshop.com/product-category/smart-switch/

Xingliao Smart Home builds smart switches, video doorbells and security cameras on Tuya WiFi and Tuya ZigBee, and runs OEM/ODM programmes from Shenzhen. Factory and ODM capability.

How to Schedule an Automatic Dog Feeder

Xing — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 18:27:31 +0000

The honest answer is that it does not, at least not on its own. Scheduling solves timing. Optimal feeding for a dog with varying dietary needs is mostly a portion and composition problem, and a single-hopper feeder can only vary one of those.

What the scheduling feature actually does

Under the hood it is not very clever. The app stores a schedule as a list of time and portion pairs, the feeder keeps a clock, and at each matching time it runs the auger for a calibrated duration. Portion accuracy comes from that calibration, not from intelligence: one rotation of the auger moves a roughly fixed mass of kibble, so the app converts "portion 8" into "run the motor for N seconds." Change kibble size or shape and that mapping drifts, which is why most units ask you to recalibrate when you change food.

The useful part is not the schedule itself, it is the logging. If the feeder records each dispense and you can see it, you learn what your dog actually eats rather than what you put down. That is the number that matters for a dog on a weight or digestive management plan.

Where it breaks down

One hopper means one recipe. A dog that needs different food at different times of day cannot be fed correctly by any single-hopper unit, no matter how good the app is.
Portion granularity is coarse. Most units resolve to a few grams per step, which is fine for a 20 kg dog and close to useless for a 4 kg one on a medical plan.
Multi-dog households defeat timing entirely. If two dogs share the feeder, the schedule tells you when food appeared, not who ate it.
WiFi outages do not stop local schedules, but they do stop the logging, and they stop you correcting an overfeed remotely.

What actually helps

If a dog has genuinely varying dietary needs, the sequence that works is fixed meal times, portions measured by weight rather than by the feeder's estimate, and a slow-feed bowl if the dog eats fast. The feeder earns its place for the middle of the day when nobody is home, which is a real problem worth solving. It is not useful as the primary feeding mechanism for a dog on a medical diet.

Full disclosure: I work on the manufacturing side of this and we build automatic feeders, so I have an obvious bias. The unit we build logs every dispense to the app precisely because the logging turned out to be the feature owners actually used. Spec sheet at https://www.xingliaoshop.com/pet-feeder/ if you want to check what I described against a real one.

Xingliao Smart Home builds smart switches, video doorbells and security cameras on Tuya WiFi and Tuya ZigBee, and runs OEM/ODM programmes from Shenzhen. Factory and ODM capability.

Do Video Doorbells Have Chimes?

Xing — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 18:27:18 +0000

Yes, but almost never in the way people expect. The chime is the part of a video doorbell that causes the most returns, because the three ways of doing it are incompatible with each other and nobody explains that on the box.

Let us start with what the three options actually are.

Option one: a wireless plug-in chime that ships with the doorbell. This is a small speaker you plug into a socket inside the house. The doorbell and the chime pair to each other directly, usually on 433 MHz or a similar sub-GHz band rather than on your Wi-Fi. It works with any doorbell, it needs no wiring, and it is the default answer for battery-powered models. The weakness is range and placement: one chime in the hallway may not be audible in a back bedroom or a garden office, and most systems only support one or two paired chimes.

Option two: reuse the existing mechanical chime in your hallway. This is what people mean when they ask "will it work with my chime". A traditional chime is not a speaker, it is a solenoid and a striker plate. It is powered by a low-voltage transformer, typically 8 to 24 V AC, and pressing the doorbell momentarily completes that circuit so the plunger fires. For a video doorbell to drive it, the doorbell has to sit in that circuit and be able to close it — which means it must be wired, and the transformer must be able to supply the doorbell's own standby current as well. Battery video doorbells generally cannot do this at all, because they are not in the circuit. This is the single most common mismatch: someone buys a battery doorbell and expects the old ding-dong to ring.

There is a second failure that is more subtle. Even when a wired video doorbell is designed to drive an existing chime, the doorbell needs a small amount of current to stay alive, and it draws that by leaking a little through the chime circuit. At low volume this is fine. At higher loads the solenoid gets enough current to buzz or to fire weakly and continuously, which is the famous "my chime hums after I fitted a video doorbell" complaint. The fix is either the jumper wire or diode the manufacturer ships for exactly this purpose, or a transformer with more headroom.

Option three: use a phone, a smart display or a smart speaker instead of a chime. The doorbell pushes a notification, and an Alexa or Google device announces it. This costs nothing extra if you already own those, it works from anywhere in the world, and it is genuinely useful if you are often away. It is also the least reliable as an actual doorbell: notifications depend on the vendor's cloud, on your phone's Do Not Disturb settings, and on your Wi-Fi behaving. If the internet is down, a cloud-based chime does not ring, whereas a local wireless chime still does.

Which one should you choose? It depends on what you already have.

If you are replacing an existing wired doorbell and you want to keep the old chime: check two things before buying. The voltage and VA rating of your transformer, and whether the doorbell's spec sheet explicitly says it supports an existing mechanical chime. Most models that do will give you a required rating, commonly 16 V AC at 10 VA or 30 VA. If your transformer is an old 8 V bell transformer, it will not be enough and you will get dropouts, reboots, or a chime that sounds like a wet cough. Replacing the transformer is normally a ten-minute job at the consumer unit or wherever the bell transformer lives, and it solves a surprising number of "my video doorbell keeps disconnecting" problems.

If you have no existing doorbell, or you are in a flat, or you are renting: battery doorbell plus the included wireless plug-in chime. You lose the ability to drive a mechanical chime and you accept that the unit needs charging every few months, but you gain the ability to install it in twenty minutes without touching a wire.

If you want the doorbell to be audible in more than one room: check how many chimes the system supports before you buy. Some ecosystems allow one, some allow several, and some let you use a smart speaker in each room as an additional chime, which is usually the cheapest way to get whole-home coverage.

One honest note about expectations. Do not buy a video doorbell primarily because you imagine answering the door from your office and telling the courier where to leave the parcel. Two-way audio over a mobile connection has enough latency that conversations feel awkward, and the courier will usually have walked away before you finish a sentence. The chime and the recording are what you will actually use every day.

I work on the manufacturing side, so I am biased toward the boring answer: decide how you want it to ring before you choose the model, not after. Drivability of an existing chime is a hardware property, and it is the one you cannot fix with an app update.

If you are sourcing rather than buying one for yourself, the specs that matter are chime output type, whether an existing mechanical chime is supported, the transformer range, and how many wireless chimes can be paired. Our range is here: https://xingliaoshop.com/product-category/smart-video-doorbell/

Xingliao Smart Home builds smart switches, video doorbells and security cameras on Tuya WiFi and Tuya ZigBee, and runs OEM/ODM programmes from Shenzhen. Factory and ODM capability.

What Is the Best CCTV Camera for Office and Home?

Xing — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 18:22:00 +0000

There is no best, and anyone who answers with a model number is selling something. The useful question is which constraint binds first, and for most installations it is not resolution.

What actually decides whether footage is usable

Low-light behaviour, not megapixels. A 2 MP sensor with a decent lens and real IR will give you a recognisable face at three metres in a dark corridor. A 4 MP sensor with a small lens and weak IR will give you a bright smear. Most of the 4K claims on budget cameras are upscaled from a smaller sensor.

Field of view against distance. These fight each other. A wide lens covers the whole door but nobody is identifiable in the frame. If the goal is identification you need a narrow lens and a fixed mount position, which means more cameras, not a better one.

Retention. A camera recording 24/7 at high bitrate fills a card in days. Decide how many days you need to keep before you choose the bitrate, not after.

Power and cabling. PoE is the boring right answer for an office: one cable, no batteries, no WiFi dependency, and it survives a router reboot. Battery cameras are convenient until you are climbing a ladder every four months.

Where office and home differ

An office needs retention, tamper resistance, and a way to export a clip without going through a phone. A home needs notifications that are not spammy and a way to check the front door from bed. Those are different products even when the spec sheet reads the same.

What I would skip

Cloud-only storage with a mandatory subscription, because your footage becomes a rental rather than an asset. And any camera whose app demands an account before it will show you a local stream.

Full disclosure: I work on the manufacturing side and we build indoor and outdoor cameras among other things, so this is not a neutral answer. Our range and the low-light sample frames are at https://www.xingliaoshop.com/product-category/surveillance-camera/ if you want to check claims against actual images.

Xingliao Smart Home builds smart switches, video doorbells and security cameras on Tuya WiFi and Tuya ZigBee, and runs OEM/ODM programmes from Shenzhen. Factory and ODM capability.

How Long Can a Cat Be Left Alone?

Xing — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 18:21:47 +0000

A healthy adult cat can be left alone for two to three days, and that number is a ceiling, not a comfortable default. Anything beyond about 48 hours stops being a logistics problem and becomes a risk problem, and no gadget closes that gap.

The reason three days is roughly the limit is not hunger. A cat can go without food far longer than most owners imagine. The binding constraints are water, the litter tray, temperature, and — the one people forget — the possibility that something goes wrong while nobody is there.

Water is the first real limit. A cat that cannot drink for 24 to 48 hours is at genuine risk of kidney stress, and this gets worse fast in warm weather. A standard bowl is also the least reliable part of the setup: cats tip them over, and a bowl that dries out on day one means the remaining days are the dangerous ones. If you are going away, put out more than one water source, in more than one room, and prefer a wide heavy bowl that cannot be pushed over.

Food is where automatic feeders genuinely help, and also where they are oversold. A feeder solves portion control and timing. It does not solve a long absence, because dry kibble left in a hopper for a week goes stale, absorbs humidity, and can clog the dispensing mechanism. Most feeders are designed around a few days of autonomy, not a fortnight. If you are away for three days, a feeder set to the portions your cat actually eats is a real improvement over a free-fed mountain of kibble, which most cats will simply gorge on in the first 24 hours and then run short.

What a feeder will not do is handle wet food. Anything with real moisture content should not sit at room temperature for hours, let alone days. If your cat is on a wet-food diet, a dry-food feeder is not a substitute and you need a human coming in.

The litter tray is the constraint that surprises people. One tray per cat is the baseline, and for a three-day absence you want at least one more than that, or an automatic litter box. Cats will start avoiding a saturated tray well before it is visibly full, and once they pick a corner of the flat instead, you have a second problem to come home to.

Temperature matters more than most owners plan for. A flat that is pleasant when you leave can become dangerous if a heatwave arrives or if the heating fails in winter. Cats tolerate cold better than heat, but a sustained indoor temperature above roughly 30 °C is a genuine emergency for a cat with no way to escape it. If you leave in summer, leave ventilation and shade you are certain of, not ventilation you hope for.

And then the thing that actually goes wrong. Cats get shut in cupboards. They pull curtains down. They chew cables. They vomit once and then refuse to eat because they feel off. None of that is solved by a machine, and all of it is why, past three days, the correct answer is a person. A neighbour or a sitter coming in once a day costs very little and catches every one of these things in the first 24 hours, which a camera will not — a camera only tells you something already happened.

So the practical version:

Up to 24 hours: extra water, a normal portion of food, clean trays. Nothing special needed.

Two to three days: multiple water sources, an automatic feeder set to real portions rather than extra-large ones, one more litter tray than you think you need, and someone who can check in if anything looks wrong.

Beyond three days: get a person in. Every day is better than every other day, and a daily ten-minute visit beats any amount of equipment.

If you are buying a feeder, four things separate a useful one from a frustrating one. Portion consistency — an auger or screw mechanism dispenses a far more repeatable amount than a rotating tray of compartments, and inconsistent portions are the whole reason people give up on them. Kibble compatibility — check the maximum kibble diameter, because large biscuit shapes jam small augers, and jamming is by far the most common failure. Power — is there a battery backup, and does the schedule survive a power cut, because a feeder that forgets its schedule after an outage is worse than no feeder. And whether the bowl is removable for washing, because a feeder you cannot clean properly becomes a hygiene problem within a month.

I work on the manufacturing side of pet devices, so I carry a bias: I think a feeder is for routine and portion control on ordinary weeks, not for making a week-long trip acceptable. It is a genuinely good tool for the cat who wakes you at five in the morning, and for the cat who gains weight on free feeding. It is not a substitute for a human.

If you are looking at these for a product range rather than for your own cat, the specs that matter are portion variance, kibble size range, power-loss behaviour, and how the food path comes apart for cleaning. Ours is here: https://xingliaoshop.com/pet-feeder/

Xingliao Smart Home builds smart switches, video doorbells and security cameras on Tuya WiFi and Tuya ZigBee, and runs OEM/ODM programmes from Shenzhen. Factory and ODM capability.