On Sun, 24 Sep 2006 23:08:18 -0400, Fred wrote:

I needed to replace my old doorbell chime. I purchased a new, simple
chime, that merely said "low voltage" (e.g. wired, not wireless) on the

You know that e.g. means "for example", right? If so, I don't
understand your sentence. ("i.e. means "that is". For some reason,
more than half the population seems to have this backwards. )

outside of the box. My door bell transformer puts out about 22 volts.
(It's probably supposed to be 24). The instructions to the new unit,
which has the name "Zenith" (probably under license by the Zenith
company to Home Depot) says that it runs on just 16 volts.

The unit has two solenoids, one for the front door, and another that has
the second tone blocked for the back door. Would 22 volts be too much
for the unit? I'm not going to be replacing the transformer on the
breaker box, so my options are to use the unit as is, return the unit
for something else or calculate what size resistor to put in series so
that the voltage received by the chime is 16 volts.

Does anybody have any experience with door bell voltage? Is it
important to have the exact voltage?

No. Especially in the case of a doorbell, where people only press the
button for a couple seconds.

I wish though that I could remember what the voltages normally are.
Everything was fine for me when I had a doorbell like your new one in
the front hall, and bell with a clapper in the basement, so I could
hear the doorbell when I was in the basement.

Then I saw a really nice doorbell at a very big discount, pretty much
like the one in the hall but much nicer. So I put the new one in the
hall and the one from the hall in the basement. Great, but now the
transformer wasn't big enough to power the two. It was either 12, 14,
or 18 volts. I think it was less than 18. I went to the store and
bought the only other size they had, which was more than 14, either 18
or 24. Then the first floor hall doorbell was too loud, and every
time the mailman rang the bell, the glass and wood breakage detector
set off my home burglar alarm! Fortunately I didn't have monitoring,
but otoh, it might have taken less than a year to find out about this
if I did. It was a year before someone told me about the false
alarms.

There is nothing very fragile in your new doorbell and 24 volts isn't
enough to melt or overheat the wires, probably even if they leaned on
the doorbell for hours, but certainly not in 15 seconds.