Weather alerts and customer notifications
PoolHelm watches the forecast along your routes and tells you which stops a storm will hit — timed to each pool, not to your whole town. It never reschedules anything on its own. You make every call.
What you’ll see on Today
Severe weather arrives as a day-strip of decision cards, grouped by storm. A storm hitting eight pools is one decision, not eight. For each affected stop:
- Skip & notify — the stop comes off today’s route and PoolHelm drafts a message explaining the reschedule. Skip all & notify does the same for every stop that storm is affecting.
- Keep — you’ve looked at it and the visit is happening.
Nothing reaches your customer until you confirm it. PoolHelm writes the message; you send it. When the weather clears, PoolHelm can send a follow-up saying service is back on.
A skipped stop still gets serviced: weather skips carry over to that tech’s next working day. Your techs see the same storm and can skip an unsafe stop themselves; it lands on your Today page immediately. Telling the customer stays with you.
What raises an alert
Rain on its own never raises an alert. An alert comes from thunderstorm risk or an official weather warning. Ordinary rain is shown to you as information.
Your controls, under Settings → AI Preferences
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| How should PoolHelm respond to severe weather? | Off, or “Alert me — I’ll decide.” There is no third option that reschedules for you. |
| Email customers on weather skips | On, Skip & notify emails the customer straight away. Off, a weather skip is internal and you tell them yourself. |
| Rain-path threshold | The forecast rain chance at which a stop counts as “in the rain’s path” on timelines and summaries. Default 60%. Higher flags fewer stops. Changes what’s shown, not what’s alerted. |
| Send me a test weather email | Sends the exact template a customer would get to your login address. Nothing reaches a customer. |
See also: “A customer wants fewer emails” and “What happens when a stop doesn’t get done?”