Let's encrypt renewal

[tre4bax]

I started getting messages from Let's Encrypt about my certificate going out of validity.  Which was weird because I had set it up to auto renew.

When I looked in the log file there is an error saying that certificate is not issued for the domain.  That's strange thought I and went in and manually hit the orange renew button.  Again the log had the same message so before I did anything else I hit the small refresh button on the certifcate line (the one that looks like a C).  This time I got a successful renewal.  In amongst the log I notice that it writes a TXT entry to the DNS that I suspect verifies it when creating the certificate.  That does not happen with the renewal, I assume it expects that to be there.

I am using CloudFlare to host the DNS and I have never removed a txt record.  Has anyone seen this behaviour before or have a suggestion for how I can avoid needing to do this manually again next time?