11 · AlertsBASIC
Alerts: only get told when it matters
A grow is lost at night and in silence. Alerts are the only thing working when you're not watching — and the only thing that ruins itself if you set it up wrong, because a hundred notifications a day turn into zero notifications read.
The four levels
- Every metric (temperature, humidity, VPD, CO₂, light, PAR, DLI, pressure, VOC, dew point) takes four thresholds: warning low, critical low, warning high, and critical high.
- You set them from the ⚙ on the Environment card, along with the targets.
- Critical wraps warning: if a value crosses straight into critical, it goes out anyway even if the warning is in cooldown.
The rules the app won't let you break
| Rule | Why |
|---|---|
| Critical has to wrap warning | Critical low below warning low, and critical high above warning high. Otherwise critical is never reached, or it's reached before the warning. |
| Minimum width of the warning band | 1.5 °C · 5 % humidity · 0.2 kPa · 100 ppm. |
| Minimum width of the critical band | 2.5 °C · 8 % humidity · 0.3 kPa · 150 ppm. |
| All or nothing | If one metric ends up wrong, none of them get saved, and the app tells you the exact number you have to fix in each field. |
Anti-noise
- Cooldown
- One hour per alert, and you can change it. The alert that gets silenced still goes into the history: the only thing you don't get is the notification on your phone.
- Escalation
- The exception to the cooldown: if it goes from warning to critical, it rings.
- Ephemeral alerts
- You mark an alert as "today only" and it turns itself off.
What else gets alerted, besides the numbers
- Equipment offline and sensors with no signal.
- Relay state change: it tells you when one specific piece of equipment turns on or off.
- Light leak: the camera sees light during the night. First it learns how dark your tent is, over seven days, and only alerts after several frames in a row — it doesn't fire on a single flash.
- Pest traps: when the photos show the pest is on the rise.
- Irrigation: close failures, dry pump, watering blocked by out-of-range water.
- Platform: a cloud's quota used up, tokens about to expire, a provider's connection going down.
Where you see them
- Push to your phone
- The main channel. It reaches the owner and the collaborators with a role.
- The bell on the card
- The alarm history for that zone, computed on the spot against your thresholds.
- Activity (☰ → Activity)
- The log of everything the system did: what it turned on, when, and why. With a filter by range and by zone.
- Telegram
- Platform and support alerts. You link the account from the chat.
Do this
Put the warning where you still have time to react and the critical where there's already damage. A warning at 29 °C and a critical at 33 °C work; two thresholds at 30 and 31 don't.
Avoid this
Don't turn off notifications to stop the noise. Raise the threshold or widen the cooldown: turned off, the history keeps filling up and nobody looks at it.
How urgent it is
EssentialTemperature and humidity with warning and critical at both ends.
ImportantEquipment offline alert on the light and on the pump.
OptionalLight leak and traps.