The 9 Best Automatic Cat Feeders of .The 9 Best Automatic Cat Feeders, Tested in Our Lab
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Automatic cat feeder for 3 cats free download
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Show details Hide details. Choose items to buy together. Get it as soon as Thursday, Sep More items to explore. Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1. Previous page. Amazon's Choice. Automatic Cat Feeder, 3. Next page. Sleep well: Cats have a mind of their own when it comes to eating. Travel: A short weekend trip is possible through a food dispenser without much advance planning.
No fear of power cuts and WLAN failures: The cable and battery provide double insurance, when you're not at home, even in the event of a sudden power cut and mains failure, our pet feeder will automatically switch to battery power and continue to feed your four-legged friend.
Lock button: Locking the function keys is a great solution so you don't have to worry about your smart and sassy little cutie learning to add meals to herself. STEP 4 Connection successful. Package Includes:. Frequent questions:. Q4: APP stability and privacy issues?
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Top reviews Most recent Top reviews. Top reviews from the United States. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. Verified Purchase. The media could not be loaded. One person found this helpful. It was easy to setup. My cats have learned not to bother waking me up. And, they have thoughtfully made a button lock, which has stopped my cat from being able to feed herself. See all reviews. Top reviews from other countries. Translate all reviews to English.
Translate review to English. Futterzeitpunkt schwankt statt um 30s um eine Stunde Zeit nicht richtig synchronisiert? Wenn alles funktioniert, ist der Preis ok, so leider nicht. Buen producto. Ansonst brauchst du nicht mehr Hilfe von deinen Nachbarn. Report abuse Translate review to English. Gutes Produkt mit leichter Handhabung.
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After more comprehensive testing, we found the WellToBe operated effectively and dispensed food accurately. However, our testers disliked a number of design choices, including its short power cable, strange button placement, and how the two bowls don't snap on to the feeder, necessitating finicky adjustments. We believe it is the better pick for anyone who would prefer a feeder that provides a separate bowl for each cat.
Plus, those separate bowls are both stainless steel, which we prefer to plastic bowls. The feeder has a locking lid that will keep your cats out, though one tester did find it a little too smooth to grip easily.
Overall, we found the Granary to be among the easiest to set up of any device we tested, with intuitive programming on a digital display that presented useful information cleanly. You can program up to ten meals a day and can adjust portion control down to the tablespoon, with a maximum meal serving that's more than four cups of dry food. The Granary has other useful features, including a battery back-up, manual feeding button, and the ability to record a short "come and get it" message to your cats.
Similarly to the other PETLIBRO feeder we recommend in this roundup, you can also insert a desiccant bag in the kibble reservoir if there's a chance of high humidity spoiling the stored food. The only downside our testers noted was the meal splitter, which can be adjusted to serve different sized portions to different bowls.
In practice, we found it tricky to make precise adjustments. It was a minor flaw in a feeder that was otherwise a favorite of our testers. Maximum Capacity : 5 liters Dimensions: But unlike the larger six-meal feeder, this one has several features that would make it the perfect choice for anyone hoping to travel with their pets.
Most notable is the clever all-in-one design, which rotates to reveal the next portion of food on a set schedule rather than dispensing food into a separable bowl. This means you can't clean the bowl separately from the five-portion carousel, but it also makes the Eatwell a cinch to pick up and move around.
This may not matter much if your feeder will occupy the same position in your kitchen for years, but anyone with reason to move the feeder around is sure to find its form factor convenient.
The cover of the PetSafe 5-Meal Pet Feeder lifts up to reveal all five compartments and the otherwise hidden programming buttons. There's nothing fancy about the software interface, which uses a small LCD screen to program exact feeding times—rotating in up to four new meals during the day, with the schedule repeating in subsequent days.
You can also suspend or restart feeding without losing your programmed schedule. As with our other PetSafe pick, the 5-Meal doesn't provide a lot of flexibility and is best for pet owners who stick to a regular feeding schedule every day.
But that simplicity was also a virtue, since more complicated machines left some testers wondering if they had properly set the feeder, which was never a problem with the straightforward PetSafe programs. The five-section carousel is made from BPA-free plastic and is dishwasher safe. Maximum Capacity : 5 cups Dimensions: 15 x 5 x 18 inches Weight: 3. We place two servings of dry food in each well, and program it to rotate at her regular meal times. That way, we're confident that she's getting a daily serving of food while we're gone.
For longer trips, our cat-sitter also refills it, so she can drop by our apartment fewer times. While we generally feel that it's preferable for automatic cat feeders to have both the ability to plug into a wall outlet and a battery back-up in case your house loses power while you're away , there's no denying the extra flexibility a battery-powered device can provide.
Rather than being limited to a wall outlet, you can place the PetSafe Six Meal Feeder anywhere, allowing it to live wherever is most convenient. Plus, with a battery life of up to 9 months, there's very little risk of losing power while you're away, especially if you insert new batteries before a trip.
The PetSafe automatic feeder isn't the most fully featured feeder on this roundup, but its combination of easy programming, useful features, and tactile buttons makes it a sturdy, reliable option.
Feedings can be programmed to any time of day in minute intervals on the LCD screen. It's easy to set up to six different feeding times a day. Or, set one feeding time, and the PetSafe carousel will dispense one of its six meals into the bowl every day at that same time. There's also a separate button for dispensing a meal right away. Since you fill the six compartments individually, you determine the portions—up to one cup per meal.
While these basic options make programming easy, it also means the PetSafe feeder may not work for very specific meal plans. For example, if you need to feed cats at different times day-to-day, there's no way to do that since the PetSafe dispenses at the same time or times every day. While primarily used for dry food, the PetSafe also works with semi-moist kibble, though testers did find that some kibble stayed behind after feedings were dispensed, and sometimes food stuck in such a way that it got in the way of easily closing the lid.
Still, these were minor issues that didn't impair any of our tests of its scheduled operation. Overall, we found the PetSafe Six Meal Feeder simple and easy-to-use, with features that make it a solid pick for anyone looking for a basic feeder. Plus, the BPA-free bowl and the food carousel are dishwasher safe, making it one of the easiest automatic feeders to clean.
Maximum Capacity : 6 cups Dimensions: Instead of regulating your cat's food schedule and ensuring they are fed whenever you are not at home, the SureFeed is more like a cat food gatekeeper. Rather than relying on a timer, the SureFeed is designed to restrict access to specific cats, identified either by their microchip or by an included RFID tag that you can hang from your cat's collar. This makes it ideal for pet owners with multiple cats on different diets.
For example, if one cat has a special diet and eats separate food, the SureFeed can ensure that no other cats in the household will eat it. It's also a great way to make sure only your cat eats the cat food, and not your dog. While it's hard to imagine scenarios where you'd need this many, the SureFeed can be programmed to identify up to 32 cats. The SureFeed is impressive to watch work, with a smooth, futuristic sliding door that peels back like the cockpit of a spaceship when your cat approaches.
Plus, it's easy to use: our testers had it set up and working with the RFID tag in about five minutes. Because you add food to the SureFeed using its separate plastic bowl, it can work with wet or dry food.
A split bowl that allows you to serve two separate portions at the same time is also included. The feeder's covered design has the additional benefit of protecting food from flies, tamping down smells, and generally keeping wet food fresher. For one, the bowl is a little small. It's not really a device that you can pile several days worth of food into and forget about. Instead, it's more specifically for actively managing a cat's diet. Also, it operates on 4 C cell batteries, and doesn't have a plug.
Since it has a six-month battery life and a flashing battery indicator , this isn't much of an obstacle, but it would have been nice to have the option of using an outlet.
Maybe the biggest downside is the open back. While the SureFeed effectively prevents more than one cat from using it—quickly closing after the identified cat leaves the bowl—a really determined dog could probably figure out a way around its defenses. Our testers felt that all of the issues they identified were minor.
While this cat feeder only works for very specific scenarios, it handles that scenario with aplomb. Maximum Capacity : Our favorite automatic cat feeder is the Whisker Feeder-Robot , which holds lots of food, allows for precise programming, and has our favorite app of any tested feeder, allowing you to easily set meals and monitor your cat's eating habits while you're away.
After timing unboxing and setup, we programmed each feeder to deliver multiple meals throughout the day, overnight, and into a second day of testing. We monitored to see if feeders were dispensing food on time. Our volunteer testers made both objective and subjective judgments throughout testing, not only measuring for accurate portions and feeder capacities, but also providing ratings out of 5 for multiple aspects, using a scoring methodology written in advance.
We looked in particular for our tester's design impressions, plus their thoughts on useful features, programming interfaces, software, and how easy each device was to clean. After testing, we asked testers for more insights into each feeder, including whether they'd recommend it to a family member and what they would want to change most about the product. Once testing in our lab was complete, feeders were mailed out to additional testers for at-home testing with their cats.
There are two main size considerations when it comes to automatic cat feeders: capacity and footprint. Overall capacity varies widely from feeder to feeder, which is a key consideration if you want to use an automatic cat feeder to keep your cats fed while you're traveling. While the amount of dry food cats eat can depend on their specific diet, a half-cup per day is fairly standard. Many of our recommended picks can hold 5 liters or more of dry food, which could feed a single cat for more than a month before you would need to refill.
Other feeders have separate compartments that you load in advance—those models typically have a much lower overall capacity. Another consideration is how much space you want to cede to an automatic feeder. Our top overall pick is quite large, and would be hard to miss in a kitchen. Other recommended feeders will take up less floor space. Our recommended feeders range from barebones models that offer basic options for scheduling meals in advance to fully-featured devices with phone apps and Wi-Fi connectivity.
Our favorite features to look for include: battery back-ups in case your house loses power while you're away , stainless steel bowls which are dishwasher safe and usable for cats with plastic sensitivities , and clear reservoirs that allow you to see at a glance how much kibble is left. Other features were less important to our testers, or even felt like a gimmick, such as the ability to record a voice message. In our experience, cats quickly learn when they're going to be fed and hardly need prompting.
Since the interface for programming a feeding schedule is completely different from feeder to feeder, we've tried to give the best sense possible of how easy or hard each feeder was to program. Ease of use comes from a combination of intuitive interface and helpful information displays. For most feeders, this means programming buttons and a small LCD screen, but several of our picks can also be programmed through a phone app. We preferred feeders that offered both options.
Automatic cat feeders are either battery or plug-in powered devices that hold and distribute cat food at certain times of the day. Similar to an automatic coffee maker, automatic cat feeders have programmable settings for cat owners to customize meal time. Feeders with a tank have a timer inside the feeder that causes a door to open and dispense a set amount of food from a container into a bowl below.
This little door shuts once the pre-programmed amount of food has been allowed to fall into the bowl and secures the remaining food in the container.
Other feeders have a round tray design, with several small compartments and lid that's open to just one compartment at a time. At the set time, the tray rotates to the next compartment.
Both designs prevent your cat from getting to the food and helps keep the food fresh until meal time. While multiple cats may have no problem sharing a dish that is kept full at all times, sharing a bowl on an automatic feeder can be problematic. Since only a certain amount of food is provided at each meal, one cat may end up eating all the food while the other cats end up not getting any. Not all cats will be as motivated to eat as soon as the food drops out of the feeder, so slower cats may miss meals if a quicker cat gets to the bowl first.
If your cats have feeding habits that aren't conducive to sharing a bowl, consider a separate feeder for each cat. There are also feeders that dispense food into two separate bowls, including one recommended in this roundup. Some automatic cat feeders hold several pounds of food, while others only hold a few cups. Less expensive models typically only hold a few meals worth of food, and more costly options may hold over 3 pounds of food.
To help you compare models, we've provided the maximum capacity in cups or liters for each of our recommended feeders. While it may seem as though it would be better for a feeder to hold larger amounts of food, smaller containers may help food stay fresh since they'll be refilled more frequently. This roundup was written by Andrew Whalen , an editor for The Spruce Pets with hours of experience testing pet products in our labs. Andrew lives with two rescue cats, Church and Wally, who have wildly different feeding schedules and eating habits.
Their input and emotional support was crucial to the automatic cat feeder testing process. A previous version of this roundup was written by Adrienne Kruzer , a Registered and Licensed Veterinary Technician in three states who has been writing on pet and vet topics for over a decade.
She has a special interest in animal nutrition, providing a wealth of experience and specialized knowledge that proved invaluable in making the best possible product recommendations. When you visit the site, Dotdash Meredith and its partners may store or retrieve information on your browser, mostly in the form of cookies.
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By Andrew Whalen. Andrew Whalen. Andrew is a commerce editor for Treehugger and The Spruce Pet.
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