Household / Home Security / Driveway Alert System

We have a long driveway at our house in which we can not see when people pull in or park. I wanted a way to know when people pull up so I was not caught off guard when someone came to the door. I have been told by many people to try this driveway doorbell system by Bunker Hill from Harbor Freight.

Many of my family and their friends have had great results with this system. I even talked to one person at the store who said they use it for their campground. No one that I have heard of has even had any problems with the distance or not alerting. The system says it works up to 400 feet away from the receiver, but we did not find this to be the case for our system. We could not get our system to ring unless the receiver and transmitter were no further than about 30 feet away from each other. We tried many different things to make it work better and nothing worked. we decided to return it. After talking to other people who have this system, we decided that we will try with another unit and hope it was just a fluke problem with the one we had.

The doorbell has two settings, quite and very loud! The loud is almost defining, but the quieter setting would have worked great in the house.

Update on February 15, 2008 12:11

UPDATE: Since the time I wrote this review, we have bought another unit and figured out why the first one did not work when we tried it. We found out that the sensor outside has to be pointing almost directly at the unit inside. Also, there can not be more than one wall between the two units.

Second, the outside unit has to be elevated off of the ground. Because we do not have a tree or building next to the driveway, we had to place it on a stake and randomly put it next to our driveway. It looks out of place and of course everyone knows it's there now.

Lastly, because it is on a stake in the middle of nowhere, the wind gets to it easily. Even a good breeze will shake the stake and make the motion sensor go off.