G6 Entry Pro - my scratch notes after testing

Ive had the G6 Entry Pro on my desk for a few days now, and thought I’d put together some thoughts and a quick summary of what I’ve observed, as well as someone who has not used the Access product before.

The G6 entry pro was my solution to my smart doorbell situation. I had a Nest - worked fine, did everything I wanted to (at the time) and delivered 24x7 recoding. At some point I decided to go with the Ecobee to compliment my migration to the Ecobee thermostat. It has a number of caveats that I do not like (no 24x7 subscription, 2-min shoddy recordings, very slow loading of videos, etc)

So now onto where I am. With the older doorbells being replaced with the G6 line, and me - a sucker for anything with a screen, I jumped onto the g6 entry pro train as soon as the device came in stock in Canada. Here are my takeaways:

1. what do you need to make things work? At minimum, the doorbell. That’s it. Although it’s a multipurpose product (access and protect) - the doorbell is really all you need for it to ring.

2. How to make it more functional? You can get the PoE or WiFi chime - which will then ring in the house

3. How do I use the intercom viewer? The intercom requires a door hub (or equivalent). Full stop. You cannot use it without the door hub in any way (yes, the mini works and I can’t test the gate hub, but I assume it does). Here’s where the information I looked at starts to… not exist. The doorbell hub only has to be present on your network. You do not need to have the hub connected to the doorbell after you paired it as a viewer to the doorbell.

4. You also do not need to even have the hub connected - the hub can be fully disconnected and powered off and the intercom viewer keeps running fine. It will only say “offline” rather than “locked” or “unlocked” below a door - but the intercom viewer will display all the feeds you paired with it. Even those that are not of the doorbell. You can simply have the intercom viewer display some random protect camera somewhere in some slide location which isn’t even remotely close to the “door”.

5. If you’re not using a hub - you miss out on the unlock and lock function. The intercom viewer retains this function, but pressing the button on the screen simply does nothing.

6. If you had set up the G6 entry pro in Access, and after you connect it as a regular device (as in not through a door hub) - it then becomes a Protect only camera with the ability to customize the background image, icon and doorbell button sound. Fun fact, you cannot change the doorbell button sound when the Entry Pro is working as an Access device.

Other things. It’s quite a toasty device. I have not figured it out yet - I thought it was due to a heater (like the G6 180), but I’m not so sure anymore. It runs quite hot - as in uncomfortably hot. I’m a bit worried about that. I’ll leave it on overnight and see if anything changes (it’s currently on my bench, waiting for better weather to install).

So far that’s about the extent of my testing. If anyone has any questions, I’ll try to answer them!