For whom the bell tolls

I consider the Hundred Acre House open, that my friends are always welcome. But I also don't want to scare away strangers.

And that is exactly what the old door bell button might do. The thing looks like some sort of trap, asking if you want to play a game. "Push me and I'll hold on," as it pinches and keeps a bit of your finger. Or maybe it burns and shocks you with the exposed incandescent light.

No matter, I'll replace the thing.

As you may have come to expect, the interior component is straight out of the 60s, with it's golden starburst, claiming to be from a future that never manifested. The future we have instead, fifty years later, is one that glows like Tron instead of sparkling like Buck Rogers.

The new button is almost exactly like the old one, but matches the color and style of the house: black and white bars. But the installation wouldn't be as simple as it's design.

Like with most electronics, there are two (or three, if it is grounded) wires involved: one incoming and one out going, to complete an electrical circuit. Door bells are no different. You push the button, it connects the two wires, completes the circuit, sending electricity to the door bell itself.

The old one was pretty mechanical. When activated it would bounce two little spring loaded pistons. One hits a tuned metal bar at the top, the second hits another on the bottom. Ding and dong. Simple. If you got the polarity wrong, switching the incoming for the outgoing wire, it might reverse it: dong-ding.

The problem was the wiring wasn't to spec. You see, there should be a red and a white wire so you know which one is the incoming and outgoing. This is what was hidden behind the button. But inside the door bell itself were two red wires. Since I was standing on a chair to reach it, and all I had on hand was a sharpie, I marked the two wires with the Morse Code for their Terminal letter. There are three terminals in a door bell: T, F (Front), and R (Rear). I don't have a door bell button at the back door, so no corresponding wire. The T and F wires should travel directly to the button at the front door, but somewhere along the path the electrician probably ran short on the white and used extra red to complete the path. No problem, I simply used my marks to connect them to the correct terminals in the new bell.

But the new bell is modern technology. It's digital and plays a range of tones, notes, and even songs. For some reason, it requires a diode (not a light emitting one) in the button at the front door. So I had to disassemble and reassemble the button to put this in. Tested the button: no dice. The bell would go off, but only for as long as you were holding the button. Your standard button press would barely register. The diode needed to be installed "facing" the right direction. I had a 50/50 chance of getting it right accidentally, but as luck would have it, I did not. So disassemble and reassemble the button for the third time...

But now its installed and working. The new bell includes a number of seasonal songs. Currently it plays Auld Lang Syne but includes things like Happy Birthday and other obnoxious noise.