Frost Warning-By-Text Service?

[roxburd]

Hi All,

A question:
Do you think keen gardners would value a service which sends an alert by text (SMS) when a frost is likely? I recently set one up for my own purposes but it occurred to me that lots of people might find it really useful. I know most garnders will keep an eye on the weather but it's easy to get caught out in October, April, May - that time of year when you're not expecting it.

I'm thinking that I could develop my service so that users could decide what months and time of day they'd like to receive their alerts and what temperature should trigger them.

Does that sound like it could be an attractive service?

Or do people use one already? I know there are weather sites and even some which will send emails... but I've not found any which will alert by text according to your own pre-set criteria...

As I said, I have knocked a prototype of the service up and it works real well for me. If anyone wants to try it out (for free!) let me know - if I do develop it I'll need testing and feedback to make sure it's as effective as possible.

Thanks,
Dave

[SarzWix]

Metcheck do it, but it's a while since I used it. I found it quite annoying in the end getting the text messages when I was checking the weather anyway, so I unsubscribed.

[roxburd]

Thanks SarzWix, that's useful to know - I hadn't seen MetCheck...

I've had a trawl through their website but I couldn't find anything quite like what I'm planning - as far as I could see, their service seems to send a report every day for £5 a month... I was planning to only send an alert when frost was likely... and only in the months you choose... and for something more like £9 a year (probably)...

Did I miss a better service from MetCheck? Would the service be more attractive if it were 'smarter' as I've described? Thanks for the feedback - it's very useful!

Dave

[weekendwellies]

I put my faith in Fred the Weatherman who is on Granada news most nights of the week. He is keen on the outdoors and gardening (and astronomy), so if there is anything we need to know about, he is the oracle. He sometimes disagrees with what the main weather people say, and he isn't afraid to say so too.

[SarzWix]

P'rhaps they've changed it since I used it, it did used to just be a frost warning. But in Yorkshire, there's a heck of a lot of days in the year that are below 5c., so it just gets tedious very quickly. Really, you only need that sort of thing for a month maybe at the beginning and end of the season.

Just to remind you too, that we don't allow advertising on the forum except in the case of official advertisers in the magazine, and even they aren't allowed to advertise within posts. I know you haven't done so, but just wanted to clarify

[zazen999]

We did used to get a frost check alert from someone on here that developed one.

It wasn't sustainable and IIRC - it folded.

I'd not pay for it to be honest; being a gardener I'm a tightwad. I'll usually find out on here when a frost is due as someone usually mentions it.

[Davyburns]

The RHS do one if you purchase their app, and it works quite well, most of the time