A woman came in one wet afternoon, put a doorbell transformer on my counter, and asked me to make the bell ring softer. The transformer was a small grey box with a pair of fine bell wires still on its terminals where it had come off the wall, and there was nothing the matter with it, and it was not the part that rang.
I put a meter on it and read both windings through, with no break in either. A doorbell transformer steps the mains down to the low volts the bell runs on and carries that current to the push at the door, and there its work ends. It does not ring. The ringing comes from the bell, when the push is pressed and the current reaches it. A bell has no volume to it. It rings as it was built to ring, and there is no turning it down.
She took that in and asked, lower, whether it could be made softer even so, and then she told me why she was asking, in pieces, around the edge of it. There was to be no noise in the house from the morning on, until the middle of the afternoon, and the bell rang all through it, the post, the deliveries, anyone who came to the door. It had never mattered before, she said, and now it did. What had changed she did not say, and I did not ask, because the hours a house keeps are not a fault I can write on a ticket.
I could have deadened the gong with felt and sent her home with a duller bell, which was the nearest thing to what she had asked for. It would not have answered. A bell soft enough not to wake a light sleeper is too soft for a caller at the door to hear, and what she needed was the bell off through those hours and ringing again after.
A bell runs on a circuit, and a circuit can be broken. I had a single-pole switch in the drawer and a length of bell wire, and I wired the switch into a small box with a tail out of either side, bared at the ends, to splice into the low-volt run between the transformer and the bell. That run carries no mains and is safe to handle and safe to fit. I told her to have it put in by the bed, so the bell could be shut off from there without crossing the house and turned on again from the same place. I worked the switch on the bench with the meter across it, open and shut, and the circuit made and broke clean each time.
On the ticket I wrote her words first, that the bell should ring softer. Under what was wrong I wrote that nothing was, that a bell has no volume and the transformer was sound. The fix was a line under that, a cut-off switch on the bell circuit, to be fitted by the bed.
She came back for it at the end of the week and took the transformer up in one hand and the box in the other and went out into the rain. The switch went home with her in its box, wired, the off and the on marked on it in pencil.