When you own your home, mounting a video doorbell is pretty straightforward. If you’re in an apartment or rental, it can be a bit tricky, though. Here’s how to use a video doorbell without losing your deposit.
Select Your Doorbell Carefully
If you’re shopping for a video doorbell for your apartment, get off on the right foot by purchasing a battery-powered model, not a wired model intended to be used with traditional doorbell wiring.
Skip the wiring-required models and go with the battery-only or wiring-optional video doorbells like Ring, Blink, and the battery version of the Nest Doorbell.
Ring 3 Video Doorbell
With superior battery life to previous models, the Ring 3 makes it easy to park your video doorbell anywhere you want it and go longer without recharging it.
You’ll note that our selections are just battery versions of the popular mainstream video doorbells on the market, as those are your best bet. You’ll get the highest quality product with useful features, good support, and easy smart home integration.
There are specialty “peephole” video cameras on the market, but they’re very hit or miss in terms of quality and have lackluster (or non-existent) smart home integration. Ring did have a very clever product called the Ring Door View Camera that turned your apartment door’s peephole into a full-fledged Ring doorbell, but, alas, it was discontinued. For the sake of renters everywhere, we hope the company brings something like it back at some point.
No-Drill Mounts Are Your Best Bet
No-drill video doorbell mounts are about as close to a match made in heaven as you can get for renters looking to put up a video doorbell without damaging anything.
While there are various mounts on the market, one of the most popular is the Doorbell Boa. The design of it, and similar models, is pretty clever.
It’s a thin C-shaped bracket with a box to lock your video doorbell in on one side and a no-scratch tension screw on the other.
Doorbell Boa
This sturdy video doorbell mount is generously sized and nearly universal for the various video doorbells on the market.
You open the door, slip it over the edge of the door, tighten it down, and it’s secured in place. Short of somebody showing up with a battery-powered angle grinder, it’s not coming off the door.
Better yet, it doesn’t involve drilling into anything or modifying your door or walls. There’s no adhesive to clean up later, either.
Specialty Mounting Tape Works, Too
If you’re not a fan of the no-drill mount or your door frame and/or door depth is a poor fit for the bracket, you may have to move on to Plan B: mounting tape.
Using mounting tape isn’t as ideal, given that you can’t easily take it down, and it’ll likely be a bit of a hassle to get the adhesive off when you finally do. But you can stack the deck in your favor by using outdoor Command Strips to adhere the video doorbell.
There is an art to mounting a video doorbell with tape, however, including selecting the right video doorbell mounting plate to use with your tape.
