Elk TRG2440 24VAC, 40 VA AC Transformer with PTC Fuse

I read all the 1 star reviews for this transformer as they relate to the Ring Pro doorbell/camera. There is a lot of nonsense about too much voltage and damage to existing doorbells etc and 24V AC being too much power. A few folks said they had dead units or ones that didn't last which can happen with ANY powered device. Ring specifically recommends THIS transformer for a DIRECT wire situation which means a direct wire from this transformer to the Ring Pro with 20 gauge Thomas & Betts wire so to the dope who allegedly ruined a $300 doorbell, READ THE DIRECTIONS first! This Elk unit is NOT supposed to be used with an existing doorbell. That being said, I had tried a 16V AC transformer and there is a phenomena known as "voltage drop" over my 25 foot run from my transformer location to the Ring Pro. The length of the wire creates impedance or resistance to the current and the voltage drops. The 16V AC transformer I tried was actually supplying about 13.8 volts to the Ring camera which caused the Ring to disconnect constantly. I then went to a Thomas & Betts 24V AC DH910 transformer. That unit also provided uneven power and the Ring kept cutting out. I hooked a Fluke meter up to the Thomas & Betts and voltage was bouncing around by as much as 2 volts and I think that voltage bounce was causing the Ring to disconnect. I did the same test with the Elk unit and it remained at 28.3 volts no-load voltage for the 3 hours I had it on the meter. Ring calls for a 16V AC - 24V AC transformer and from my painful experience, unless your transformer is within a few feet of the Ring camera and you have 20 gauge or lower wire,, use the Elk 24V AC transformer, NOT the Thomas & Betts. I finally found the Ring Pro recommendation for this particular transformer buried on their website. I have to give Ring a written slap on the head for not having their recommended components front and center with the Ring Pro camera data. Even their tech support "chat" folks could not find the recommended component list on the Ring site when I asked them to provide it for me after I had seen it once and forgot to bookmark the URL. Their tech folks also give conflicting data - some told me 24V AC or MORE was better and others told me that 16V AC was better. The documentation says 16V AC - 24V AC and that depends on your supply wire length. Ring needs to tighten up their tech support team who can be real dopes Anyway, since I installed this Elk 24V AC transformer, unplugged the camera for 30 minutes, powered it back up and did a 15 second camera "hard reset" and reconnected to my WIFI, the Ring has remained online constantly for a full week - it's never done that before, it was going offline every 12-18 hours for months, even after I had jumped through every Ring tech support protocol multiple times with Ring (the Ring tech support "dope" factor I just mentioned) Bottom line is that based on my 3+ months of screwing around with the Ring Pro and it's constant disconnections, I now know that the Ring Pro camera/doorbll is VERY sensitive to both WIFI signal strength AND voltage and if either vary too much or bounce around, your camera will disconnect constantly and drive you nuts. Hope that helps - Tretiak

Really not much to say. I needed a 24-volt transformer with these specifications. It was reasonably priced, arrived when promised, and was easy to connect. I plugged it in, and it worked exactly as advertised. Or at least it has for the entire two days I've owned it. A word of advice: Try not to accidentally throw away your perfectly functioning original transformer. But in the event that you DO accidentally throw away your perfectly functioning original transformer, this is the place to buy its replacement. Don't ask me how I know. DUH!!

Pretty easy. The packaging shows you what to do with the GND wire (nothing), which I was concerned about immediately. It comes with a longer screw that you can use after removing the screw from your outlet to secure it in place, just in case it gets bumped and wanted to fall out. It is pretty heavy and a little awkward, so I was happy for the extra screw to make sure it would stay put. I'm not an HVAC professional, so I'll just outline my experience. I installed an ecobee4. From my original thermostat, I had a Rc, Y1, W1 and G wire. I had an extra blue wire running to nothing, but using a $20 multimeter I bought, I found it was only running 8-10 VAC. I first turned off the whole system. I live in an apartment complex so, being unfamiliar with HVAC, I A) didn't know exactly where to look to see if I could use that blue wire at the furnace for a C wire and B) didn't want to be seen outside jacking with the complex, and my neighbor's possibly, HVAC stuff. Anyway, I turned everything off. I checked the wires with the multimeter. Initially I'd installed a Nest because I didn't have a C wire and when I turned everything off, the Nest did not say that it needed to be connected to power, so I was worried. I worked for a little longer removing wires VERY carefully and finally realized that I had that mulitmeter and checked the voltage on the wires to find there was nothing running to them. That made everything much more relaxed. I removed all the Nest stuff, then ran the transformer cable up which I just used some extra wire I had. It was nothing special. It had a accessory plug on the end. I have no idea what it was originally for, but I just clipped it off and stripped the wires to where I needed. I attached it to the AC terminals on the plug and, just to test without installing anything or doing anything at all really, plugged the wires into the C and Rh terminals. I got no response. So, hoping that I didn't just fry the thing (which you can't if you're using the correct voltage right? I don't know), I moved the Rh wire to the Rc terminal. It powered on and went through it's thing. I took everything out and put it up on the wall with the cables in place. I attached the easy cables (Y1, W1, G and C). The problem with Rc became that the hole for the wire was really small to only allow for the one wire. The cable from the transformer is threaded. I couldn't get them both to go in. So, I ended up stripping the original Rc, which was a solid wire, and wrapping the threaded wire around the base. Pushed the Rc lead in and made sure the surrounding wires are in tight enough that nothing is exposed to touch the part of the Rc assembly that needed to be left bare to connect the transformer wire. Turned the power on and plugged the transformer in and it power up just as before. It has rebooted once, but I was messing with Homekit, and I think it actually just crashed. It's been fine for the past 5 hours. I looked around for step by step for my wiring, and hope this helps anyone in a similar situation. tl;dr: It works well for the ecobee4. Test it with just the transformer first on Rc or Rh and C to make sure it gets powered on. You'll not break your furnace transformer that way. You might have a hard time with the wires into the ecobee backplate being too much to fit into the receptacle. You can wrap one wire around the other and put the unwrapped one into the backplate. Be sure that it (joined Rc/Rh) won't touch the other wires. Otherwise, it's been great. Oh! I was also super worried about having the external transformer wire connected to the same wire that was initially providing power to the system (as stated, the wire from the transformer is wrapped around the original Rc wire), but I checked it with the multimeter afterward and it still ran the same 26 -29 VAC.

I own an ecobee3 Smarter Wi-Fi Thermostat with Remote Sensor, 2nd Generation, Works with Alexa and at my previous apartment I was able to connect the unused blue wire to C and everything worked fine. Then we moved to Texas, and I tried the same thing and no dice. There were so many things wired into the blue "Common" wire AND I'm not familiar with how they do HVAC in the south (I'm from the North). Basically, I couldn't get a reliable voltage, so I picked this up. Works perfectly, as it should. I do like the green LED on the unit letting me know it's on. And if you have an ecobee (or similar) thermostat you're using this with and are totally confused about where you should be connecting the transformer to here's how I did it. Wires supplied from HVAC: Rh (Bridged over to Rc inside old thermostat), G, Y, W Connecting the transfer I did the following: 1 wire from transformer to Rc Other wire from transformer to C Nothing connected to transformer Ground The HVAC Red lead to Rh and the rest I connected to their proper colors. I also configured the ecobee to ignore Rh, and just use Rc, G, Y1, W1, and C. Works perfectly.

I purchased one of these a few years ago and thought it was junk, but in reality it was my error so I am here to write a current review because I purchased another one. I originally purchased this item to power the switch machines on my model train layout and it has performed admirably. I was having lots of problems with the lighting transformers that I had purchased since the very beginning of my layout so I decided to try one of these. It has worked fine running the lights on my layout until last night when it started to smoke on me. I am uncertain if I have too many led's hooked up to it, or if I maybe wired something wrong, but it caused me to shut the lights off in my basement and walk away from the train layout in frustration. I have about 50 lights on my layout and all but 2 are led, the other two are bulbs. I do believe that this transformer can handle the load and maybe I cross wired something incorrectly because it didn't smoke while I had all the lights on before. Recently I started adding another shelf on my layout (underneath) and decided I need to go under the layout and rewire everything to a pcb board so that I wont have to crawl under the layout anymore. I have wired 24 lights to the pcb board and the rest are still connected to bus wires around the layout. I have decided to keep wiring and maybe split the wires between 2 of these transformers.

I bought this item because my common and r wires were only putting out 14VAC where they were supposed to be putting out 24VAC of course (gotta love multimeters) and this product solved my problem perfectly. This is the only product that I could find that would do what I wanted and is "natively universal" as opposed to others being tied to other companies and using plugs which I would have had to strip off which might (:-P) void my warranty for the power supply. You will have to go buy your own wire but you can get that by the foot from home depot (or Lowe's I'm sure), plus it's kind of nice knowing that you won't have to by a new power supply or at the least splice the wires if the original wires short or are cut too short. Anyways, I installed it and had a little trouble with the fact that my system wouldn't turn on unless the original R wire wasn't plugged in but it only took me about 2 minutes to figure that out and it had nothing to do with the power supply. I have only had it hooked up for about 2 hours now but it is so nice to use the wireless remote and temp monitor for my thermostat. I opted out of using a wifi thermostat as I didn't want to have to have my phone routed through the thermostat to the router which might slow my 200mbps connection to my phone or tablet that I pay out the wazoo for (at least I think that's how it works). Also, I don't know how many devices I could have connected to the wifi and then I also wanted a temperature sensor seeing as my room where I spend most of my time when home tends to be hotter than the rest of my apartment. Yes, I did say apartment and it's a small one at that, I am very proud of my laziness and like the room cold when I sleep but warm when I get out of bed and I am too lazy to teach my dog to work the thermostat lol. It's great and I love it, I also love ranting so yeah... Let me know if you have any questions as I would be happy to answer.

My Ring Doorbell2 was discharging the battery that comes with the Doorbell 2 system very quickly. It seemed that the battery would be totally discharged within about three weeks. At first I purchased a 14 VAC transformer from Amazon, but the battery was losing about 5 % of its charge per day even though the transformer was wired directly to the Ring Doorbell 2 system with the use of a 25 ohm, 50 watt resistor as recommended by Ring documentation. Therefore, I decided to buy this, 24 VAC transformer, and connected it to the Ring Doorbell 2 system with the 25 ohm, 50 watt resistor using a pair of 18 gauge wires that are about 20 feet long. By slightly reducing the sensitivity of the motion detector, our Ring Doorbell 2 system has been running for about one week with the battery charge level between 94% to 100%.. It currently has a battery level of 99%. Before buying this transformer, I was seriously considering, not using the Ring Doorbell 2 system as part of our home security system.

I had the same one before, and even though it says "overload protected", it fried when we had an electricity spike, and even fried Nest doorbell powered by it. Both had to be replaced. I give it another try, since I could not find any other model with the similar description, but I am very suspicious. I might add an overload protection to it...