As I've been searching the internet to find good methods of getting notifications to my phone about when something happens in my house, i stumbled across Prowl. It is free and easy to configure with openHAB, there's just one extra thing you'll have to remember.

To set up openHAB on your Raspberry Pi, check out this post.

So let's configure it. First open up openhab/configurations/openhab.cfg in your choosen text editor. Then paste in the following text:

########################## Prowl Action configuration #################################
#
# the apikey for authentication (generated on the Prowl website)
prowl:apikey=insert-prowl-api-key-here
# the url of the Prowl public api
prowl:url=https://api.prowlapp.com/publicapi/
  

Swap the text "insert-prowl-api-key-here" with your api-key found at the Prowl website: https://www.prowlapp.com/api_settings.php

Also, check that the 'prowl:url' is correct.

Now you can make rules that sends you notifications to Prowl, like this:

rule "Heat the livingroom"
  when
   Time cron "0 30 5 * * ?"
   then
     sendCommand(heating1, ON)
     sendCommand(heating2, ON)
     pushNotification("Heating","Heating of the livingroom has started")
  end