Alerts & notifications

What Guardian watches for, where alerts show up, and how they reach you on each plan.

Guardian’s job is to tell you the moment something on your boat or RV needs attention — a flood sensor tripping, a battery bank sagging, shore power dropping out. This page covers where those alerts live in the app and which delivery channels each plan unlocks.

Where alerts show up in the app

The Alerts destination in the app is the home for everything that has happened on a vehicle:

  • Per-device event timeline — a chronological feed of events for each device: flood alarms, threshold crossings, valve activity, and status changes.
  • Current-issues banner — anything that needs attention right now is surfaced at the top, so an active problem is never buried under old events.

Alongside that, every vehicle keeps an on-device event log. It is part of Guardian’s local history — always on, free on every tier, and available even if you never create an account. See History & data for what is kept and for how long.

How alerts reach you

Channel When it works Plan
Local alerts in the app While the app is open — on the vehicle’s network or remotely Any tier, including Free
Away push notifications Even with the app closed, delivered through the cloud path Any tier, including Free
SMS escalation Text messages for the events you choose Premium
Voice-call alerts Coming soon A phone call for the events that must never be missed Planned for Premium

Away push notifications ride the cloud path: your sensors push events to the cloud, which forwards them to your phone or desktop even when the app isn’t running. This works on every tier, including Free — background delivery is not something the plans gate. What the plans change is where else an alert can go: Free sends email to your account address only, while paid plans add extra destinations (3 on Basic, 8 on Premium) and SMS.

SMS escalation (Premium) is configured per event in the app’s Account view, so you can reserve texts for the serious stuff — say, flood alarms — while everything else stays a quiet push notification.

What can trigger an alert

Flood alarms

Flood alarms are the fastest events in the system. The Shelly Flood Gen4 sensor spends its life in deep sleep and is never polled; the instant it senses water it wakes and pushes an event directly — to the app locally, and via the cloud path to your phone. The cloud path runs the flood-shutoff fallback and sends the push notification even with the app closed, both on every tier including Free. There is no polling interval to wait out.

Remember the safety model: the flood watchdog and cloud shutoff are the fast-reaction layer. The primary safeguard is that the valve only ever opens with a volume or duration limit, so even a worst-case burst ends with a bounded amount of water. See Water control & safety.

Threshold alerts: battery voltage and shore power

Battery voltage (via the Shelly Plus Uni) and shore power (via the Shelly PM Mini Gen3) generate alerts when readings cross thresholds you control:

  • Battery chemistry presets — pick your bank’s chemistry (Flooded, AGM, Gel, or LiFePO₄) and Guardian sets sane default voltage thresholds for it. Every threshold stays customizable if your setup needs different numbers.
  • Shore power — losing AC at the pedestal or post raises an alert, so a tripped breaker at the marina doesn’t become a dead battery bank days later.

How fresh is the data behind your alerts?

Remote status freshness depends on your plan: Free is manual refresh only, throttled to roughly one pull every 3 minutes; Basic updates automatically with about 5-minute freshness; Premium updates with about 30-second freshness. These windows apply to routine telemetry such as voltage and power readings — flood alarms are event-driven and sent by the sensor the moment they happen, and they reach you with the app closed on every tier, including Free.