Automatic cat feeders

What do I need to know? What’s good?

Birds or mice?

Mice are better than birds, less feathers.

We’ve got one, microchip activated. It’s great. Two cats, one a greedy Tom who wolfs his food down and is always on the scrounge for more. The other, a timid anxious female who grazes little and often. When we just put food down for both of them, the Tom ate it all, got enormous whilst she got stressed and hungry. We also have an opportunistic spaniel which doesn’t help!

It took her a week or two to get used to it, but after that it’s been trouble free for 3 years bar one battery change. She grazes as and when she feels like it, the others can’t touch her food.

What make is it?

.
I think automatic cats just need charged now and again rather than fed?

What make is it?

Surefeed

Not cheap!

We have one of these feeders from Amazon, works on a simple timer that opens in the wee small hours of the morning (or whenever you set it for) and stops the furry little terrorists waking us up because they think they’re hungry.

They’re in charge

I guess what you need depends on why you want it, if the purpose is to stop one cat eating the lot then a chip controlled one would do the job. If it’s just to dispense biscuit during the day then the one I linked to ought to be sufficient

G

We have four of them…

Cat feeders by Ben Freeman[/url], on Flickr

Do they do one for the fridge? Asking for a friend?

Automatic cat feeders

what are you actually trying to achieve? Feed cats whilst away for a day or week on holiday?
As good as those Surefeed things are that Bloke & footlaps have posted (we have a couple!) that’s not the tool for the job… they’re more food management solutions – great for making sure the right cat gets specific food, and stopping neighbourhood cats stealing it or flies landing on it!

(We don’t keep ours warm on the hob tho 😂)

(We don’t keep ours warm on the hob tho 😂)

They’d just come out the oven….

Ah yes I should have been more specific. We want one to feed the cat for a weekend whilst we’re away, Christmas in this case. With our last cat you could just leave loads of food out and he’d help himself appropriately (unless it was IAMS); this one will gorge on dry food and would eat the lot in one go.

I didn’t know there were other use cases!

A one-off for a weekend? I can recommend a cat-sitter if you’re still local to me.

@molgrips – We have one of these, works well with dry food for our opportunistic/ruthless/very affectionate fur ball who adopted us in the first lockdown.

She is a big cat at 5-6kg depending upon how her hunting is going, not able to get inside it even after bouncing it the full length of the kitchen the first time we used it in a massive strop…

https://www.zooplus.co.uk/shop/cats/cat_bowls_feeders/feeders/programmable/601554?origin=hopps&q=c500&i=1&ro=1

Another vote for the one kimura linked to, above. Has served Lester very well for several weekends away over the last year or so. Has compartments that you can set the timer for, to allow 1 feed for up to 5 days, or 2 for 2 days etc.

A one-off for a weekend? I can recommend a cat-sitter if you’re still local to me.

Neighbour’s teenage daughters are our solution, £10 a day for twice daily feeding is the going rate….

£60/hr to feed a cat, I’m in the wrong job.

£60/hr to feed a cat,

Our current cat feeder is quite exceptional, she reads to them in the evening to keep them company, so more like £10 an hour!

She has lots of clients – proper little business she has got going….

Cat Mate C500 Automatic Pet Feeder is the ‘digital’ version of the one we’ve had for about 15 years. Works well, can’t be defeated by the cat bashing it repeatedly (Many other feeders seem easily defeated by a smart, or just violent, cat )

This one is genius level – https://youtu.be/AGrCbdMMYVQ

The main issue with the old mechanical one we have is working out whether the battery is flat (which the digital one should solve)

A one-off for a weekend? I can recommend a cat-sitter if you’re still local to me.

Thanks Cougar but that was only a short project, haven’t been up your way for many years.

Fifi is only about 2.5kg and not what I’d call violent, although seems fairly bright so far and patient. I’d rather have more than 5 slots for food though because she’ll gobble a day’s food at one go.

I have a Pet Mate C10 (ha! the one a Bengal beats in the video linked above!) which works well for a one-off timed serving of food. We use it on the daily to give the cat breakfast because the early-morning miaowing was getting very annoying until we worked that out. It is covered in scratches from when she tried to defeat it, but otherwise going well just over a year in. Looks like the Cat Mate C100 is about the same thing with nicely rounded corners.

For a whole weekend we get someone to pop in once a day and top it all up along with her regular dish so that the cat gets her two servings, then the timer’s good to separate them. Our cat is a greedy ****.

If you’re only doing dry food there are dispensers on Amazon and the like that seem as if they’d handle longer periods of time for you. Basically a big bucket with a timed opening into a dish below, for about £60, or a little bit more for wifi access haha.

👍

I had the old non-digital version of that rotary CatMate also. It worked well for a weekend away. It came with ice packs to allegedly keep wet food something approaching fresh, but I just used it with biscuits.

Neighbour’s teenage daughters are our solution, £10 a day for twice daily feeding is the going rate….

My neighbour thinks my teenage kids feed their cats when they’re on holiday, when really it’s me ever since one of them (cats, not the kids!) disembowelled a rat on the kitchen floor and now they refuse to go in except in extreme need.

They don’t get paid, but do get a large bar of chocolate each when they return. Which my kids don’t get to see either…..

We had two different rotary ones and even after cat proofing with wedges and shims, the temptation of being able to bend the lid enough to see the food meant they always defeated it within hours! Either lid off and eat the lot, and once I’d modified them, they’d either knock the batteries out, jam it under a radiator or otherwise break it so we’d get home to a cat feeder still full of food.

We ended up with four of these which worked great… The only downside is they are analogue so you can’t ensure both cats get fed as the same time so it turns into a headbutting battle to share each bowl when they open 5 minutes apart.

https://www.argos.co.uk/product/7967768?clickSR=slp:term:automatic%20pet%20feeder:1:43:1

But then shortly afterwards a special diet meant we had to buy one of those £80 surefeed jobs so now the cat sitter is booked for anything over a day now!

My neighbour thinks my teenage kids feed their cats when they’re on holiday, when really it’s me ever since one of them (cats, not the kids!) disembowelled a rat on the kitchen floor and now they refuse to go in except in extreme need.

Thanks to CCTV, I get an alert on my phone and a 10 sec video clip everytime someone comes in the house, so I know exactly who fed them when and how long they were there etc.

NB I did point out all the cameras before hand and explained how they worked etc.