Greenhouse climate controllers from Priva, Hoogendoorn, and Argus can all send you an email when something goes seriously wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The problem is that “sending you an email” and “getting your attention” are two very different things<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An alarm email from your climate controller joins all 3,000 of the other unread messages in your inbox. It’s entirely possible that by the time you see it, the damage window has already closed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Text messages cut through that noise in a way email can’t. We don’t ignore texts and we don’t miss them. And that’s really<\/em> helpful when it comes to make-or-break alarms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this article, I’ll cover the absolute fastest, easiest, and cheapest way to route your controller’s alarm emails to your phone as text messages<\/strong> whether you’re on a Priva Compass, a Hoogendoorn iSii, or an Argus TITAN. You won’t need to buy SMS bundles from your vendor or bolt an autodialer to the wall to get there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To get this working, we’re going to take the email notifications your controller already sends and route them to your phone as text messages. It takes about five minutes regardless of which system you’re on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n text.email<\/a> is a service that turns any email into a text message<\/strong>. Send an email to your text.email address, and it shows up as a text within seconds. It’s a full drop-in solution which means there’s no software to install on your controller.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sign up at text.email. You’ll get a private address that’s This is where things differ depending on which system you’re running. I’ll cover the big three. If you’re on something else (Link4 iGrow, Wadsworth Seed, or a standalone Sensaphone), the same principle applies: find where your system sends alarm emails, and toss your text.email address in there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Priva’s alarm notifications go through their cloud-based Notification Center<\/strong>, which is part of the Priva Connected subscription. If you’re already getting email alerts from your Priva system, you’re most of the way there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Log into the Notification Center, click your user icon in the top right, and go to Notification preferences<\/strong>. Add your You can add email recipients to Hoogendoorn’s iSii process computer in the alarm settings section of the interface.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Add your text.email address as a recipient there<\/strong>. The iSii also lets you set alarm delay times to cut down on sensor error floods, which is worth tuning before you start routing alarms to your phone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Argus has an Email Notification<\/strong> add-on for the TITAN system. If it’s enabled on your system, open the Email Notification configuration and add your text.email address to the Master Recipient List<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From there, you can set up your event-driven notifications<\/strong> that fire when specific alarm conditions trigger. Argus also lets you set email frequency limits<\/strong> to cap how many emails go out per hour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Argus offers two delivery methods: cloud-based<\/strong> (simpler, no email server to manage) or SMTP-based<\/strong> (uses your own mail server). Either works with text.email since both just send a standard email.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Before you let this run wild with your real alarms, trigger a test notification from your controller. Most systems let you force an alarm condition or have a test alarm function.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On Priva, you can temporarily lower a temperature setpoint to trigger a temperature alarm. On Argus, the alarm configuration lets you test individual alarm conditions. On the iSii, you can trigger a test through the alarm overview.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you’ve looked into getting text alerts directly from your climate controller, you’ve probably run into one of a few dead ends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Priva’s Notification Center<\/strong> does offer SMS. But… and this is a big but… you have to buy prepaid SMS bundles separately, and the only way to order them is by calling Priva. Pricing isn’t published anywhere. Priva themselves recommend using push notifications instead, which tells you something about how much they want to support the SMS side of things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Push notifications through their app are fine when they work, but they require the Notification Center app installed on every phone that needs alerts and as we all know, push notifications can be hit or miss.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hoogendoorn<\/strong> doesn’t offer native SMS at all. The iSii alarm app sends push notifications, but if you want a plain text message, there’s no native way to get one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Argus<\/strong> systems can be equipped with phone dialers<\/strong> \u2014 those are hardware devices that call a list of numbers when an alarm triggers. These still work, but they’re a legacy approach. Like, it feels like something out of the switchboard era where they’re sending your alerts to Klondike-5-2342. They’re expensive, they require a phone line, and they can only call (not text).<\/p>\n\n\n\n So you may have a vague recollection of email-to-text being a part of your cell phone plan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was, but it’s not any more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Every cell phone carrier had a gateway address, like If your controller had one of those addresses hardcoded into its notification config, those texts stopped arriving and nobody sent you a warning letting you know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And yeah, one more: Building your own email-to-SMS pipeline is technically possible, but it means dealing with something called A2P 10DLC carrier registration<\/a>, maintaining a Twilio<\/a> or Vonage account, and keeping the whole thing running indefinitely. For a handful of critical greenhouse alarms, that’s a lot of infrastructure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Every greenhouse controller covered in this article can send email. text.email<\/a> turns those emails into text messages<\/a> \u2014 and it works with Priva, Hoogendoorn, Argus, or anything else that can send email alarms (which is, as far as we know, every system).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Your plan will include 200 messages a month \u2014 and if it helps you catch even one<\/em> critical error a year, it pays for itself and then some. Most growers will use a fraction of those 200 messages \u2014 the point is that the alerts you do<\/em> get are the ones worth getting out of bed for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You can test it right now without signing up. Send an email to Not every alarm your controller generates needs to wake you up. Here’s a rough split \u2014 of course, your priorities will vary depending on your crop and your setup.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Always text:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Probably fine on email:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nGreenhouse Climate Controller Text Alerts: Table of Contents<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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How to Set Up Quick Text Alerts from Priva, Hoogendoorn, and Argus Controllers<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Step 1: Sign up for text.email<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
yournumber@yourkeyword.text.email<\/code>. That address is what we’re going to plug into your controller’s notification settings in the next step.<\/p>\n\n\n\nStep 2: Add your email-to-text address to your controller’s alarm notifications<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Priva (Connext, Compass, Compact CC)<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
yournumber@yourkeyword.text.email<\/code> address as an email recipient. You can also set up rules<\/strong> to control which alarm groups trigger email notifications (so you’re only getting texts for the alarms that warrant them).<\/p>\n\n\n\nHoogendoorn (iSii)<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Argus (TITAN)<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Step 3: Send a test alarm<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Why Your Controller’s Built-In SMS Options Probably Aren’t Cutting It<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
What happened to the old cell phone email-to-text feature?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
5551234567@vtext.com<\/code> or 5551234567@txt.att.net<\/code>. Well now, the major carriers \u2014 Verizon, AT&T<\/a>, T-Mobile, even others like Boost Mobile \u2014 shut those gateways down<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\nSet Up Your Greenhouse Climate Controller Text Alerts in Five Minutes<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
yournumber@text.email<\/code>. If your phone buzzes, you know the rest will work.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhich Greenhouse Alarms Are Worth a Text?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Start Getting Text Alerts from Your Greenhouse Controller<\/h2>\n\n\n\n