How to Get Critical Text Alerts From Your Agrowtek GCX

Good news: If you check the docs, Agrowtek has an easy method for sending SMS alerts from your GCX when something serious goes wrong.

Bad news: The method doesn’t work like it used to. (Which might be why you wound up here.)

The GCX manual says, and I quote, that alerts “can be emailed or sent by text message using the system email sender.”

In practice, they’re saying the method for text alerts is by using an email-to-text address. And the method everyone used for that for decades involved the email-to-text address that was part of your cell phone plan (like your-number@vtext.com).

But… over the past few years, the cell phone companies have all killed off their email-to-text services.

So we need a replacement email-to-text option that works just as smoothly and simply as the cell carriers’ service used to.

And that exists.

In this article, I’ll show you how to set it up.

Agrowtek Text Alerts: Table of Contents

• How to Set Up Agrowtek Text Alerts (the 2026 and Beyond Method)
• Other Options for Getting Agrowtek Alerts
• Get Going Fast with Agrowtek SMS Alerts
• Which Agrowtek Alarms Are Urgent Enough for Text Alerts?
• Time to Get Started with Agrowtek Text Alerts

How to Set Up Agrowtek Text Alerts (the 2026 and Beyond Method)

There’s still a drop-in solution for turning emails into text alerts from the GCX.

Here’s how to do it.

1. Get yourself a drop-in email-to-text address

The service we’ll use for this is text.email, since it works just like the old cell phone carriers’ email to SMS service. (Though it does have some extra features those didn’t.)

Sign up at text.email and you’ll get an email-to-SMS address that’s your-number@your-subdomain.text.email. Anything sent to that email is converted into a text.

Copy that address so you can drop it in during the next step.

(Note: If your alerts need to reach more than one person, you can set up text.email to send to a distribution list, or route by schedule for an on-call rotation.)

2. Add your email-to-text address to the GCX’s recipient list

Now we’ll head over to the controller.

GCX’s email settings are in System, in the Email tab.

Add your text.email address as a recipient, then press Test. (The test is mandatory.)

You should get a text on your phone within a few moments.

3. Choose which alarms will text you

Your existing alarms already email everyone on that list, so they’ll start texting you right away.

If you have a sensor that isn’t alarmed yet, set the high and low values on the device’s alarm page, check Enabled, and save it.

Other Options for Getting Agrowtek Alerts

The email to text method is simple, but there are certainly other ways to get your alerts.

Once again, the carrier options (like yournumber@vtext.com or yournumber@txt.att.net or yournumber@tmomail.net) are out — the carriers shut that service down and aren’t bringing them back.

So here are the other possibilities.

Building your own alerting system (either with email to text or another way)

The method I just shared for getting text alerts requires using an email-to-text service. Which, inevitably, means you’re wondering if that’s necessary and you could just build your own.

You absolutely could. There are two different ways.

1. You could create your own email-to-text system, using Twilio or another SMS provider. (Although depending on what you’re growing — e.g., cannabis — they may not allow you to use their system.)
2. The GCX publishes its values over MODBUS, so something else on your network could read them and send texts.

But there’s a downside to managing the whole system yourself. Which is… you’re managing the whole system yourself.

You have to build it, test it, trust it, and maintain it. (You also have to figure out how to navigate the concept of something called A2P 10DLC, which is a regulatory system you need to abide by to send these texts.)

Even in the vibe coding era, at some point it’s just worth it to pay a few dollars to let someone else handle the infrastructure stuff — especially when critical alerts are at stake.

Push notifications

If you register your GCX to Growlink’s cloud service, you can get push alerts through the Growlink mobile app. (You could also do your email-to-text alerts that way; there’s no native SMS option with Growlink either.)

Are push notifications as attention-grabbing as texts? I haven’t found them to be — push notifications get buried too easily in my experience — but if you want to go that route, this is the easiest way to do it.

A horn, a strobe or an indicator light

The AXG gas alarm module can drive a horn and strobe, and an alarm can operate an output device.

These are certainly attention grabbers — but they’re filling a different need than the text alerts. These are great if you’re in the room… and not so much if you aren’t.

So these are more of a companion to text alerts than a replacement.

Get Going Fast with Agrowtek SMS Alerts

Even though the GCX doesn’t have native SMS alerts, you can easily use its email alerting system to get them. You just need the right email-to-text system (now that the old cell phone carrier version is defunct).

text.email is the drop-in solution. Sign up, get your email-to-text address, and add it to your Agrowtek controller. You can set up text alerts about critical issues in a matter of minutes.

(You can even try it first without signing up. Just drop your-number@text.email into the controller and send a test.)

Which Agrowtek Alarms Are Urgent Enough for Text Alerts?

Unfortunately, the GCX only has one recipient list. I’ve written these guides for a lot of different software and controllers in a lot of different industries and that’s pretty rare. But it’s the reality, so we have to deal with it.

And ultimately, it means that if you enable an alarm, it had better be serious enough to be worth a text.

Here’s a rough plan to get you started; adapt it as you will.

Alarms for these:

• CO2 over your alarm level. (Keep the horn and strobe for this one too.)
• Root-zone pH or conductivity past either set point.
• Reservoir level low, or a liquid-detection sensor tripping.
• Room temperature past your high limit during lights-on.
• A doser or pump dropping offline.
• Flow reading zero (if you have an SXF on a fertigation line).
• The controller’s power-up message, since it’s the only sign you get that it was ever down.

No alarms for these:

• Readings drifting slightly off target in a room you’ll walk through anyway.
• Anything in a room that’s empty or between cycles.
• Trending-only channels like ambient light.
• User logins.

Time to Get Started with Agrowtek Text Alerts

Agrowtek’s manual is right: Email-to-text is the best way to get urgent alerts from the GCX. But the method that people used to use for that is now defunct, since the cell carriers dropped their email-to-text feature.

If you want email to SMS today, you’ll need to use a service — and none of them is better for this kind of drop-in alerting than text.email.

You can get text alerts for your next CO2 spike or dead pump within five minutes. Sign up for text.email, drop your address into your controller’s email settings, and you’re all set.