The Good: Self contained LED lit and solar powered. Lasts the better part of the night even in winter with little sun durning the day. Very visible at night. Occasionally free as a promotional item
The Bad: The $50 price tag. This is a piece of tech that is meant to sit in a highly visible place in front of your home, but is also a target for being stolen. The most prominent word on the sign is “RING” which isn’t a well enough known name in video surveillance to deter would be thieves until they get up close enough to read the sign.
Overall: As a free promotional item, I can see how this sign is nice to have. As a $50 purchase, there is no way I can recommend this. Even if Ring were as well known as ADT or other major security companies, paying $50 for a sign just seems silly, even if it does light up. If anything, I’d like to see a picture of a camera in a prominent position on the sign.
As you may have guessed, I got this as a free promo with my Ring Doorbell. Initially I placed the sign as pictured at the top of my driveway, but found that it wasn’t readable from the road. I have since moved it to a flower bed at the end of my driveway. I have noticed multiple people stop to check out the sign and fully expect to find it gone one morning.
There is virtually no setup to the sign. The package comes with a snap together plastic pole, which can be short as pictured, or another section
can be added to make it about a foot taller. There is a weather protected rocker switch on the back of the sign to turn it on or off. Once the sign is outside I see no reason to turn it off again.
The sign features three small solar panels across the top three sections and they seem to provide enough power to keep the sign lit for an entire night. I can see it lit when I wake up before sunrise, so it is definitely making it through long early January nights.
Other than flipping the power switch, connecting the pole and sticking it in the ground, there is no other setup. The only thing that I can recommend here is to put the sign well within view of your security cameras because this is definitely a target for random acts of vandalism. In two weeks I’ve caught two scrap collectors eyeing the sign and looking up at my house.
As a free item, the sign is great. It lets would be criminals know that something is recording activity at your house, even if they don’t know what Ring is. Given that professional security companies don’t even light their signs, I don’t see any reason why this sign needs to be lit. You would probably be just as well off printing a picture of the sign and mounting it on an octagonal plastic frame and sticking it in front of your house.
Update 11/2020: According to my neighbors the sign stopped lighting up months ago. I rarely go to the end of my driveway late enough to see for myself, but I went and checked and they’re right, this is now just another regular sign. So if you buy this (and don’t buy this), you’re looking at a possible maximum lifespan of about 3 years on the electronics.
