This is the most-asked question in the whole no-drill category, and it is usually answered badly — either “yes, Command strips hold anything” or “no, use screws”, neither of which tells you anything useful. So here is the arithmetic, because it is genuinely reassuring once you look at it.
The X-Large picture-hanging strips we point at are rated on their listing at 20 lb. A Ring indoor camera weighs a fraction of a pound. A video doorbell weighs a few ounces. Even a heavy dual-camera doorbell with a full battery pack is nowhere near a pound. You are not operating at 80% of the rating and hoping — you are at a small percentage of it, with an enormous margin.
Which means the rating was never the interesting number. Nobody’s camera falls off because 20 lb was not enough. They fall off because the 20 lb was never available in the first place.
What actually decides whether adhesive holds
Four variables, in rough order of how often they are the culprit.
1. The surface (by far the biggest factor)
A weight rating is measured on a smooth, clean, rigid, fully cured painted wall. Every step away from that costs you a large fraction of the number:
- Smooth painted drywall, metal, uPVC, glass, sealed wood — you get the rating, or close to it.
- Textured paint, orange-peel or knockdown drywall texture, wallpaper — substantially less, and wallpaper adds a second failure mode: the paper can release from the wall before the adhesive releases from the paper.
- Brick, rough stucco, unsealed masonry, shingles — effectively zero. Not reduced; zero. The pad touches a fraction of its area and bonds to loose surface material. This is not a stronger-tape problem, and it needs a different method entirely.
2. Whether the paint has cured
This one catches people in freshly turned-over apartments and it is worth knowing about because it is invisible. Paint feels dry in hours and takes weeks to fully harden. Adhesive applied to uncured paint bonds to a layer that is not yet properly bonded to the wall underneath — so the mount holds fine and then takes a coin-sized patch of paint with it when you leave. If your unit was painted in the last month, either wait or mount to something else.
3. Whether you cleaned it with alcohol
Not a fussy detail: the oil transferred from a hand is enough to materially reduce the bond, and a damp cloth relocates it rather than removing it. Rubbing alcohol, then let it dry fully. This is eight seconds of work for a meaningful fraction of the rating.
4. Temperature and cure time
Adhesive works by flowing into the microscopic texture of a surface, and it flows much less when it is cold. A strip applied to a frozen exterior door frame may never reach the strength the same strip would have reached indoors in August. And on any surface, the bond is at a fraction of its final strength the moment you let go — it needs an hour minimum and ideally a full day before it carries weight. If you take one thing from this page: press hard, then wait.
The three adhesives, ranked by hold against removal risk
Strength is easy to buy. The renter’s problem is that strength and clean removal pull in opposite directions, so the useful ranking is not “which holds most” but “which holds enough with the least chance of a bill”.
Best overall: heavy-duty picture-hanging strips. A published 20 lb rating, many times what you need, and a designed release mechanism — you stretch a tab downward and the bond lets go. That combination is the whole reason they win. They are an indoor product and we will not pretend otherwise.
Better still, where it exists: the purpose-made mount. Worth saying plainly because it saves money. A no-drill doorbell plate shaped for your specific model spreads the load properly across a bracket that was designed for it, which a flat strip cannot do. If a dedicated mount exists for your device, buy that first — and reach for strips only when its factory adhesive is marginal for your surface, or when the thing you are mounting has no bracket at all.
Strongest, and the one to be careful with: industrial VHB tape. It will hold anything on this site through anything. It is also close to permanent by design, and on painted drywall the honest expectation of removal is lifted paint. It is the only mounting product in our registry rated Lease-Safe: Limited, and that rating is about removal rather than hold. Where it genuinely earns its place: metal, uPVC, or sealed exterior trim — surfaces that can survive being pulled apart. Not the wall of a rental you want a deposit back from.
The mistake that costs more than a fallen camera
Almost everything above is about the install. The expensive mistake happens at the other end, and it is one motion: taking the device off the wall by pulling on the device.
Every removable adhesive has a designed release — usually a tab you pull slowly and straight down so the strip stretches thin and lets go of both surfaces at once. Prying the mount away from the wall instead applies force at an angle to a bond that was engineered to resist exactly that, and the weakest thing in the stack is the paint. Warm it with a hair dryer, find the tab, pull slowly. Our clean-removal guide has the full method, including what to do about residue that stays behind.
Done that way, the whole approach is genuinely deposit-safe — which is the point of it. Our deposit guide covers what a landlord can and cannot charge you for, and the answer is more reassuring than most renters assume.