Saillogger has two settings sections that are easy to confuse. Alerting decides what raises an alert. Notifications decides how it reaches you. If a low-battery alert does not arrive, the first table below shows which setting to check.
Which one do you want
| What you want | The section |
|---|---|
| Be told when the wind gets up or the battery runs low | Alerting |
| Change the wind speed or battery level that counts as too much | Alerting |
| Stop an alert firing at all | Alerting |
| Stop the e-mails about your trips, or get them on your phone as well | Notifications |
| Turn everything off for a while, then turn it back on | Notifications |
An alert has to pass both: the threshold under Alerting decides that something is worth telling you about, and the row under Notifications decides whether that news is sent to your e-mail, your phone, both or neither.
Alerting: what raises an alert
Open saillogger.com/app/settings/alerting, or Settings, then Alerting.
At the top is one master switch, Alerting. It is off when you start, and while it is off the section shows nothing else: every threshold is hidden.
- Turn on Alerting.
- The threshold rows appear, in four groups: General, Weather, Temperature and Depth & battery.
- Type a number into the rows you care about, and clear the rows you do not.
The thresholds
Every threshold except the first can be switched off by clearing the box. An empty box reads Off.
| Row | It alerts when | Starting value |
|---|---|---|
| Minimum time between alerts | Quiet time before the same alert can repeat | 6 hours |
| Wind speed | Wind rises above this | 30 knots |
| Pressure | Pressure falls below this | 990 hPa |
| Pressure drop in 12 hours | Pressure falls this much within 12 hours | 12 hPa |
| Outdoor temperature | It falls below Below, or rises above Above | Below 3 C, Above off |
| Indoor temperature | It falls below Below, or rises above Above | Below 7 C, Above off |
| Water temperature | It falls below this | 10 C |
| Water depth | Depth falls below this | 1 m |
| Battery charge | Charge falls below this | 50% |
| Battery voltage | It falls below Below, or rises above Above | Below 12.5 V, Above off |
Minimum time between alerts is the one row you cannot turn off. It is a whole number of hours, and the lowest it will accept is 1. Leave it at 6 and the same alert will not repeat more than once every six hours, however long the gale lasts.
The three temperature rows can go below zero. Each has a ± button beside it, because a phone's number keypad has no minus key.
Rows with two boxes
Outdoor temperature, Indoor temperature and Battery voltage can alert in both directions, so each has two boxes: Below and Above. They are two separate alerts sharing one row, and each is set and cleared on its own. Leave Above empty and you keep exactly the alert you had before.
Above starts empty on every boat, including boats that have been using Saillogger for years. Nothing starts alerting because this arrived; set a number only where you want one.
What the upper box is for:
- Indoor temperature is the one most boaters want. It catches a fridge or freezer that has failed while you are away, a cabin heater stuck on, or a boat getting hot enough to matter to a pet aboard or to your electronics. Point it wherever your inside sensor is: many boaters put that sensor in a fridge or an engine bay rather than the saloon.
- Battery voltage catches a charger, alternator or regulator stuck high, which cooks a battery bank and takes electronics with it. Set the number above your charger's absorption voltage, or normal charging will trip it. If you are not sure what that is, your charger's manual gives it.
- Outdoor temperature is the weakest of the three, because there is rarely anything to do about it from shore. It is most useful set high, as a rough "something is very wrong" signal.
Thresholds are read and written in your own display units, whatever you have chosen under Settings > Units & appearance. If you have set wind in knots and depth in feet, that is what these boxes mean. See Make Saillogger yours for the unit settings.
There is no Save button
Each field saves on its own the moment you leave it: tap or click somewhere else, or press the done key on a phone. The row tells you when the value is stored.
Anything that is not a number is refused rather than saved, with a line under the row explaining what it wants, so a mistyped threshold cannot quietly disarm an alert.
If an alert never fires
- The Alerting master switch is off. Turn it on before checking the individual thresholds.
- The threshold is empty. Empty means off, not zero.
- Your boat does not report that reading at all. An alert can only fire on a value the boat actually sends. Check on your dashboard that the reading appears there first.
- It already fired inside the quiet period set by Minimum time between alerts.
- The alert fired, but the Monitoring Alerts row under Notifications has e-mail and phone both switched off, so it had nowhere to go.
Notifications: how anything reaches you
Open saillogger.com/app/settings/notifications, or Settings, then Notifications.
This is a grid: six kinds of news down the side, and up to two channels across the top, E-mail and Phone. Each column has a master switch in its heading, above the individual switches.
The six kinds of news
About Your Boat
| Row | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Critical | When your boat comes online or goes offline |
| Navigation | New logbook entries, stays, and daily & weekly summaries |
| Monitoring Alerts | Threshold alerts from the Alerting section, and geofence alarms |
From Other Boaters
| Row | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Friends | New followers, and arrivals or departures of boats you follow |
| Direct Messages | Direct messages from other Saillogger members |
| Fleet Messages | Group chat messages from fleets you belong to |
Everything you set under Alerting arrives through one row: Monitoring Alerts. So does a geofence alarm, if you have an area set around the boat.
The E-mail master switch is on when you start, and so are the individual rows. Turn off a single row to stop that kind of e-mail and keep the rest. Turn off the master to stop all of them at once.
Phone
The Phone column is not there until you link a Pushover account, and the Phone master switch is off until then. Pushover is a separate app made by another company, and it is a paid app: Saillogger sends your push notifications through it.
Under Notifications you will find a Phone notifications panel below the grid. There are two ways to link:
- Press Set up Pushover. You are taken to Pushover to subscribe with your Pushover account, and Saillogger stores the key for you when you come back.
- Or paste the key yourself: open Pushover on your phone, copy the user key from its main screen, paste it into Pushover user key, and press Save. This is the way to do it inside the Saillogger app, where the first method is not offered.
Either way, the Phone column then appears beside E-mail with its master switch on. Turn off any rows you do not want on your phone, and keep the categories that matter for how you use and monitor the boat.
A push is only ever sent when both the Phone master and that row's phone switch are on. Nothing bypasses the master.
If your phone alerts stop arriving
A Pushover user key can stop working: you moved to a new phone, reinstalled Pushover, or made a new Pushover account. When that happens the panel says Not delivering and tells you when Pushover last refused the key.
Open Pushover, copy the user key from its main screen, paste it into Pushover user key, and press Save. Saillogger checks the key with Pushover before storing it, so you find out there and then whether it is right, and your row choices are kept exactly as you had them.
Send test pushes one alert to your phone straight away, which is the quickest way to be sure it is really working. Disconnect forgets the key and switches phone alerts off; your e-mail notifications carry on unchanged.
Turning a master off
When you turn a master switch off, its column dims and stops sending, but your individual choices are kept. Use the master for a temporary pause, such as a winter ashore, and individual rows to keep particular categories off.
The notifications page inside Saillogger
Not everything has to arrive as an e-mail. The same news is listed at saillogger.com/app/notifications, newest first, and the bell at the top right of every screen carries a count of what you have not read. The envelope beside it does the same for unread messages.
Two things to know about that count:
- Opening the page does not clear it. Notifications remain unread until you open the individual row or mark them all read.
- A notification is marked read when you open that row, or when you use Mark all read beside the heading.
If you skim the list without opening individual rows, the badge remains so you can return to them later.
The weekly summary e-mail
Once a week Saillogger sends a summary of where you have been. It rides the Navigation row along with new logbook entries, stays, the daily passage update and your badge e-mails, so there is no separate switch: turning Navigation off stops all of them. What is in it is on Statistics and badges.
If notifications stop arriving altogether
- Check the E-mail master switch first. One tap turns off everything in this section.
- Check the individual row. Friends and Monitoring Alerts are especially worth rechecking.
- Check the address on your account is one you still read, under Settings > Account.
- Look at saillogger.com/app/notifications. If the notification is listed there but absent from your inbox, check the e-mail address, spam folder and e-mail switches.
- If the news is not there either, nothing was raised. For an alert, that sends you back to Alerting and the checks above.
If those checks do not resolve it, we are glad to help through the community forum or [email protected].