I have an idea for a new project, and wanted to get some ideas about how to accomplish it.

Our home has a 16VAC wired doorbell system installed. The bell is in a cheap white nutone plastic housing in the living room.

I want to upgrade this with a vintage longbell tubular chime, and primarily so we can hear in the whole home, I want to install it on the wall above the stairs to the second floor.

The doorbell I got is an older 24VAC unit, which is fine. On the other side of the wall of interest is a bathroom, and I can fairly easily drill a hole to supply it with that power.

The tricky part is the wiring of the pushbuttons. Even though the distance is short (~20ft?) it is not easy to re-route the pushbutton wiring up to the stairwell.

So now I am thinking of setting up some wireless connection between the two doorbells. The living room doorbell will be non-functional, except to transmit a trigger signal to the other doorbell.

I would need at least two different signals (front and rear door buttons), but I am thinking more would be better because I may outfit the new bell with selectable chimes, where a longer press would yield a different tone sequence.

I would love any pointers to suggestions about solutions that would be
- relatively simple analog, with some minimal encoding (AM?)
- solutions that leverage cheap already available consumer electronics

Thanks!

 

That ought to be easy though some electronics knowledge is required.
Go to your local hardware store and buy a 2-button wireless doorbell.
One button for the front door and the other for the rear door.

Now, you will have to do some hacking at the receiver part. You will need to disconnect the loudspeaker that produces the chimes.
Then you will need some electronics that triggers your old time doorbell. I can't provide you with more detail until we see the actual wireless receiver.

 

Interesting. Ideally I would like to use the existing wired buttons to trigger the transmit for those. How would that interface likely work? I suppose it will be a 16VAC signal that I rectify, then use to close a switch effectively shorting that button switch?

 

Interesting. Ideally I would like to use the existing wired buttons to trigger the transmit for those. How would that interface likely work? I suppose it will be a 16VAC signal that I rectify, then use to close a switch effectively shorting that button switch?

No. It is simpler than that.
You disconnect any wires going to the wired buttons you have at present.
You simply wire the old button in parallel with the button in the wireless transmitter.

 

That is simple, but I suppose I'd have to live without the button illumination if I did it that way.

 

I have a 16VAC doorbell that I wanted to keep. It now has a 12V wireless doorbell transmitter as the pushbutton. This is powered from the 16VAC and when the button is pressed, it sends the radio signal to the new doorbell that operates to my shed, but also, switches a short across the 16VAC to ring the original Ding Dong doorbell. A blue LED is also added to illuminate the pushbutton.
Is that the sort of thing you want?
I can try to figure out the circuit for you later.

 

Maybe - i'm not sure.

I want to use the existing 16VAC setup as-is, but add the following inside the housing of the old doorbell:
- a switch to disable the existing doorbell chime (when I just want to hear the vintage longbell)
- the two wireless pushbuttons which will get triggered by the exisiting illuminated wired pushbuttons.

I just ordered a GE 19300, hopefully that will do the trick.

 

You could use the existing pushbuttons to activate a 16Vac relay.
The relay contact then shorts the wireless doorbell button inside the old doorbell to activate it.
For that you need a wireless doorbell with just one pushbutton.

 

You could use two channels of a 4 channel wireless remote (Such as this.) in conjunction with the AC relay as cruschow has suggested. They require a 12 volt DC supply but that could be derived from the 24 volts AC supply for the chime. (Bridge rectifier, a couple of capacitors and a 12 volt regulator.)

Les.

 

As noted above by @crutschow, you can keep the existing 16VAC setup. Use a relay to trigger the wireless push button.

 

My mod is something like this..

The transmitter ran on one of those small 12V batteries.
Where the FET drive for the solid state relay come from will depend on the pushbutton.



And I've added a blue LED for a light at night.

This mod keeps the existing door bell and adds a wireless one. A bonus is the 16VAC powers the door bell transmitter so saves a 12V battery.