****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
I read the negative reviews before buying and decided that there were enough counterpoints to decide that the people having problems were having issues with what they have done, not with the charger.Like all solar panels, this is a trickle charger. It will generally only trickle power in slowly. However, having direct sun access is crucial because... well, its a solar panel. The sun tops the houses across the street from me early in the morning and climbs up above the edge of my roof above the door about four hours later. With that limited amount of direct sun, my Battery Doorbell Pro's battery will add about 20% charge per day thanks to this panel.Some Ring doorbells use 'optimized charging' where the cell is supposed to only charge up to a max of 80%. This 80% limit can be difficult to trigger for reasons beyond the scope of this review, but I found that on the BD Pro, if the cell is already fully charged prior to the solar charger's installation, the solar panel will do absolutely nothing until the battery gets down to about 70%. Only then will the solar charger start charging. When it does, it charges up to only 80% (stopping at 81%, actually). From there, with the sun I get, the solar charger will maintain between 70 and 80% battery charge indefinitely. I have the DBPro set to take snapshots every three minutes and do everything else that eats extra battery power. The direct sun access I get lets me do that. If your direct sun is less, you will have to adjust your settings to eat less power, or get used to the solar panel just extending battery life rather than making it never-ending.The exception to the above is the initial charge of the battery. When I installed my solar charger, I only had about a 38% charge on the battery. The solar charger added 20% per day until I was up to 100%... and then it seemingly did nothing for days until the battery slowly dipped down to 70%. Then it magically started up again into the cycle I describe above. Here again if you have limited sun access, you might not see this kind of clear result and it may look like the charger isn't doing anything.
