Online temperature alert service?

Does anyone know of any online services that will send you an email based on what the forecasted temperature is?

I'm looking for something that will remind me to leave the greenhouse open when it is going to be above a certain temperature and to make sure it is closed when it is cold.

 

bearing in mind that most online temperatures for my area are totally wrong I would not trust such a system if it did exist.

I think you just need to bear in mind the current conditions and work with that, along with a good helping of common sense.

 

It might be an idea to buy an automatic vent opener, these are temperature set so that when it gets too hot it will open your greenhouse vent, then close it when it cools. Similarly, you get get an automated opener for louvre's too.

Or you can use a little weather station, I have one of these. The sensor sits in your greenhouse, the control pad indoors and it monitors the temps for you. Around £20 to buy they are worth it because you can see at a glance how hot or cold the temps are, useful for me at the moment to monitor overnight temps as it will store max and min temps between daily resets.

As an example, overnight temps this week are around 4-5°C...so its still too cold for my Cucumber plants to go out into the greenhouse.

Steve...

 

Thanks for the suggestions. I'm quite new to the gardening world so I'm not really settled in to a reliable routine yet. I'm just concerned that there might still be a late frost coming that I will not anticipate and could ruin everything!

 

Matty - thanks for raising this question - you set me thinking. As a result of your post I have just set up an equivalent system for myself. To make space I have turfed a lot of tender stuff out, and have to keep protecting it if it looks like frost.

1) Here are a couple of sites that give you frost warnings. http://uk.weather.com/weather/10day-Harrogate-HG2 and http://news.bbc.co.uk/weather/forecast/2535?area=HG2 Obviously you will have to put in your postcode to get figures relavent to yourself. You can then save them in favorites and call them up when you want.

2) Or - what I have just done is to make one my homepage, and then put my internet browser into my startup menu. This means that every time I switch on the computer, the page automatically appears on the screen - so I can't forget..

 

Forecasts can only give a general idea for the area, in that area you can have pockets which will have lower temperatures than the surrounding area. I would suggest that you have something which will give an alarm when a critical temperature is reached, but then you have to be prepared to get up in the middle of the night to deal with it. Personally, I put a fan heater in the greenhouse set to "Frost free".

 

I take your point Larkshall about temperatures only being approximate. But I would regard a warning as being useful. I had a heater in my greenhouse over the winter, but on the coldest nights I might also want to put some fleece over borderling plants in the garden.

At the moment I have put a number of plants in pots outside, but would bring them in again if I thought there was danger of a frost.