SMS alerts — what to expect

Mother Hen sends SMS alerts when something at the coop needs your attention. The alerts are designed to be high-signal: you should be able to trust that a text from Mother Hen means a real event, and you should not be drowning in routine status messages.

What triggers an alert

Mother Hen sends an SMS when:

• A monitored door changes state at the wrong time. The chicken door closed during the day. A human door is open at night. The chicken door did not open near sunrise, or did not close near sunset.
• Temperature or humidity crosses a threshold. The coop is dangerously hot, dangerously cold, or extremely humid for long enough that the birds’ welfare is at risk. The thresholds are calibrated from poultry-science research — heat-stress, frostbite risk, ventilation problems — and use sustained-duration filters so a single brief spike does not page you.
• A sensor stops reporting. A Coop Climate Sensor that has gone silent for several minutes is flagged. The reading you would otherwise see is no longer trustworthy.
• The Controller goes offline. The Controller has not checked in with the cloud for long enough to be a concern.

You will not get an SMS for routine readings, daily summaries, or “your coop is comfortable” messages. The Portal shows current readings whenever you want to look. SMS is reserved for things you would want to know about even if you were not at your phone.

24/7 by design

Mother Hen sends alerts at any hour. There are no quiet hours, no time-based suppression, and no per-recipient schedule. A 2 AM predator-shaped event sends an SMS at 2 AM, exactly the same as a 2 PM event.

This is deliberate. The whole point of the system is to wake you up when the coop is in trouble — a “quiet hours” feature that silences a real emergency at 3 AM is worse than no system at all. If you do not want to be alerted overnight, the only correct way to do that is to disable alerts entirely (see below), not to schedule them.

How to silence the system

There is one master on/off toggle for SMS alerts, available in the Portal under your account settings. Flip it off, and Mother Hen stops sending any SMS. Flip it back on, and the system resumes.

There are no per-alert mutes, no per-recipient schedules, and no “only send these kinds of alerts” filters. We considered finer-grained controls and decided against them: the failure mode of a partial mute is that you think a category is silenced, a different category fires, and you miss it because you were not paying attention. One toggle, all or nothing, is honest about what is happening.

Managing recipients

SMS alerts can go to one or more phone numbers. Manage the list in the Portal under your account settings.

To add a recipient after purchase, contact support. Self-serve adding of additional recipients is currently a manual workflow — we add the number to your configuration server-side. There is no extra cost for additional recipients.

Last updated: 2026-05-14.