OP he thanks so much for all the opinions and advice.

I'm having second thoughts about renewing the wifi bell: as more than
one person has said "Newer is not necessarily better".
(Ho, Yes! I agree with that sentiment alright! "Newer" usually has
more convenience, and lots of "neat" new tricks (if you can be arsed);
but it brings with it a world of niggles, re-learning, complications,
dead-end diagnostics, and ultimately replacement.)

I still have the original decades-old house bell set in place (though
not connected). I may decide to reconnect it, and extend the bell wire
from the house doorpost through the porch to the porch doorpost.

But first I will try following Dave L's excellent advice concerning
sealing something "too well", resulting in condensation: I may have done
that, which would explain a lot.


If I go down the re-install-the-old-bell route: is there any advice on
drilling through the porch door post (which is the usual uPVC with (I
presume) a steel core)?

John


And PS:
Jethro_uk wrote:

There's a whole town in Italy rigged with this stuff that monitors the
(elderly) residents and uses pattern matching (hence IBMs involvement) to
allocate care visits.

Ah, god: I still get a little thrill from seeing that acronym! We had a
giant 360/67, then a massively bigger giant 370/168 at work, 1967 -
1984. (In this particular case, "newer" was in fact better, by an order
of mega-steps :-) We got an Amdahl after that -- astonishingly more
impressive; but it didn't have those powerful three letters.