Customer Reviews

PetSafe 5-Meal Electronic Pet Feeder

5 star:		(129)
4 star:		(73)
3 star:		(22)
2 star:		(21)
1 star:		(53)

 

 

This feeder is exactly what I expected. High quality, easy to use, and reliable. I previously purchased the two - sided feeder by Petsafe and was very happy. It still works great, but I needed to go away for 4 days and it just didn't have enough slots. It took my cat about a week to get used to the whirring noise that the feeder makes when it rotates the dish; He wouldn't go near it if I didn't stand next to him while he ate. I made it a positive experience for him by putting a small meal in each of the slots (even just a few kibbles) and for a week he got a food reward everytime the machine made the whirring noise. Now he runs to the food dish everytime it whirrs because he knows it means food. I definitely would recommend this product to a client (I am a veterinarian). My only advice is to make sure that you give a few weeks for your pet to adapt to the whirring noise before you leave them alone with the food dish. This also allows you to make sure that you learned to program the dish correctly. As for batteries it takes four. I bought this product in August and it's now November. I have not needed to replace the batteries yet. Some purchasers complained that their pets were able to manipulate the machine to get to food ahead of time, but I have not had this problem. This product would be great for anyone working long hours and needing to feed their pet multiple meals per day, which is recommended for pets needing to lose weight and diabetics.

I got this when I went on vacation. My cat has to eat small portions or it comes back up, and of course my cat sitter can't stop by 5 times a day. Enter the PF5-11. It delivers equal portions 5 times a day (or 1 meal every day for 5 days, or 2 meals every day for 2 and a half days, or whatever). So the sitter came by once or twice a day and just refilled the hoppers. Now I use it all the time. Phoebe Cat now anticipates the feeding times and has stopped bugging me to feed her. It's pretty easy to program, very accurate, and seems to run a long time on the D cells. The motor only really runs for 5 seconds a day. Highly recommended.

The low rating is due to the fact that my determined 10-pound cat merely turned the inner compartmentalized tray with her paw, within 5 minutes of seeing the unit for the first time, thus, revealing the food-filled adjacent compartments. When she found the automatic feeder, the first day I set it up, it was 8 hours before her next regular feeding (she was not hungry), yet after smelling food in the unit, she dutifully used her paw to turn the food tray ahead one compartment.

The fatal flaw is that the fully enclosed compartmentalized tray does not lock into position when resting between timed feedings and is incredibly easy to rotate; no real physical force is required to advance the tray to the next one or several (food-filled) compartments. Only some level of interest in the enclosed food, in conjunction with a slight amount of determination is required for the animal to rotate the tray, at will.

Years ago, we did use another automatic timed feeder with this same cat, the Cat Mate C20, which is a 2-meal, flip-lid type of feeder. We would fill up both compartments for the day, and she would immediately lift up both lids with her paw within minutes after it had been filled. That unit also was no match for our obsessive eater.

Our cat is not large in size, nor has she provided any evidence that she is particularly clever, particularly strong, or particularly intelligent, she's just one obsessive (determined) cat regarding her food. My cat joins the ranks of the other reviewers, whose animals very simply pushed the tray around, at will, with little force. We had the identical problem as the 10/1/07 reviewer named E. Genzoli, whose Boston Terrier, moved the inner compartmentalized tray around with his face after 3 months of use and the 9/11/07 reviewer named NashvilleLady333 whose Australian Shepherd, also moved the compartments ahead at will after only "days." My 10 pound cat moved the inner tray around at will with her front paw within 5 minutes of our ownership of the Petsafe PF5-11. This unit has a design flaw which is fatal if your pet's history regarding food intake reflects even a slight level of determination.

In summary, if your pet is somewhat determined and/or intelligent, then this unit's design failure (the non-locking compartmentalized food tray) will become apparent in no time, making the unit completely useless for its intended purpose of timed feedings. The pet need not be strong, heavy, clever, brilliant, nor be a dog in order to exploit the fatal design flaw of the non-locking compartmentalized tray. We have ordered the Super Feeder CSF-3; it may be our only hope for sleeping in, in the morning with our adorable, but food-obsessed cat.

The last review was great. I'll try to restrict this to additive comments.

Pros:
- the five food chambers are deep; our fat cat makes less to no mess with this setup. It is amusing to see him bury his huge head in the chamber.
- no assimilation problems at all; in fact, he didn't realize the relatively quiet chamber rotation meant no food was available. He's figured it out now.
- setup was a breeze and took about five minutes; hardest part was cutting the super-tight plastic packaging away from the gizmo.
- feels like a quality product and takes rechargeable batteries
- has good grips on the bottom so our Roomba vacuum doesn't push it around

Cons:
- takes up some space; we stuck it under our kitchen island with just the open chamber sticking out.

Overall - big five stars as its reduced our food refill time by 2.5x (we feed him twice daily)

Don't bother with this feeder unless you don't really care what time it opens. I bought this to feed 2 cats simultaneously, but the timers' accuracy is so poor that it is impossible to get them to open at the same time. The result is that the dominant cat will eat all the food when the first one opens, then the same cat will eat all the food when the second one opens (up to 45 min later!), while the meek cat starves. The thing is also so light that the hungry animals knock it all around the room, making tons of noise in the meantime. I was very disappointed and somewhat in disbelief that for a price this high, this feeder could be so cruddy!

When we first got this, we loved it. It allowed us to feed our diabetic cat every 6 hours without getting up in the middle of the night. He learned to launch off the bed like a rocket when he heard "The Autmatic Food God" rotate noisily to dispense the manna of catfood at the appropriate time. But after only a few weeks, he figured out that he could smell the food in it, and pushed on the current portion of the bowl to advance it to the next position. And then the next, and the next... and he really pigged out on four meals!! After that, it was useless.

It has two other drawbacks, too. The plastic bowl irritated his feline acne. Our vet says that many plastic bowls do that, and recommends that cats be fed only out of stainless steel or china. Why don't pet food bowl manufacturers consider this, since it is a common problem? And it doesn't have ice packs to keep canned food cool. It would dry and harden before the next meal needed to be served.

All in all, this was a very expensive disappointment.

This doesn't work at all. From the first day it hasn't opened on time. After the very first opening of the compartment it hasn't closed flush so the cat can see and smell her food and forces it open. Don't waste your money!

Our cat has a binge/purge problem: when given more food than she should eat at one sitting (not a whole lot) she gorges herself and then hurls, usually on the downstairs carpet (much to our chagrin). She also gets rather nippy when the bowl is empty, and in addition is somewhat overweight. So we ordered this automatic feeder hoping to more closely control her eating habits. She only likes dry food, so an auto-feeder seemed like a good bet.

When it arrived, it took a while to get it out of the packaging. A really thick clear plastic clamshell covered it, and I had to be very cautious with the razor knife so as not to open an artery. I put 4 new D batteries in it (a bit awkward in the battery compartment, but not horrible) and programmed it to rotate at 3am, 9am, 3pm, and 9pm. Programming is pretty easy once you understand what the buttons do. Lots of flexibility here too, as you can program up to 10 feeding times with resolution to the minute level.

But when I pressed the advance feed button the bowl just when round and round and never stopped! I disassembled the unit and tracked the problem down to a bad IRLED (you can see IR with any digital camera btw). Luckily I was able to track down an appropriate spare, and once it was soldered in the unit began working as advertised.

The five food compartments are all molded in a single piece of plastic, and this item is very easy to remove - just put your finger in the front hole to release the catch and the top hinges up. The bowl assembly then simply lifts out. The food compartments are roomy, more than enough for our cat. Even if you only feed your cat once a day there is probably plenty of room there for that. But I wouldn't use it for wet food as it would spoil. The five compartment design is particularly handy for us, as it allows us to remove the feed bowl at roughly the same time every day and fill the other four compartments while there is still some of her food remaining in the fifth. A spare bowl assembly would be nice to have. That way one could be in the dishwasher while the other is in use.

Anyway, other than being broken right off the bat, post repair this bowl has been working like a champ. The batteries haven't pooped out yet after several months of use, and our cat has become very accustomed to it. When she hears the motor turning the bowl she comes running. I was concerned that maybe she could get hurt by the rotating bowl delivering a pinch, but the motor is a fairly loud, and gives fair warning. In fact it is so loud that it wakes us up sometimes, even though it is located down the hall in the kitchen (our house is extra quiet thought). You definitely wouldn't want this in the same room with you sleeping! We are considering moving it downstairs.

UPDATE: Two years later the feeder is still working like new, and we haven't even changed the batteries yet!! I sincerely wish they would sell a spare bowl unit for this though to facilitate cleaning.

UPDATE - March 13, 2010: Would you believe that we still have the original batteries in this thing? Amazing. I'm going to change them though because we want to make sure it works for our cat sitter when we go on vacation. This feeder was worth every penny we paid for it!

We bought this two feed two cats in the morning. They want to eat at 5:00
am and I want to sleep at 5am. If there is food available, it will be eaten immediately.
The feeder works like this:
You fill up the food dishes and close the lids. There is a battery powered
mechanical timer to let you set how long from now to open a lid for each
dish. You can set the timer for up to 48 hours, at roughly 1 hour increments.
This meal feeder has the following drawbacks:
The precision of the timers is not adequate to be sure that they open together.
The dishes that come with the feeder have a lip that sticks outside where
a motivated cat can grab it and pull out the dish part way and get at
some of the food.
The feeder is light weight so that while the motivated cat is attempting to
open the feeder, it can get turned upside down and fail to feed the cats.
We made adjustments to this as follows:
-replaced the dishes that came with the feeder with ones that fit inside
(cheap margarine tub like things)
-attached a round wooden table top from the hardware store to the
bottom to keep it from being moved around and tipped over
-planning to attach a small bar across the lids to ensure that both lids
open at the same time

It is a high quality item - probably the highest of all that I have seen. However, this will not work for smart dogs or cats!

Granted the dog probably wont be able to open the lid, but they don't have to. The tray on the inside does not lock into position. It only takes a small amount of pressure to push on the side of the food compartment and make it rotate over to the next one! My Australian Shepherd had this figured out in a matter of days, and even my coating the open compartment in apple bitter spray did not stop him.

This thing is useless if you have a smart animal.

It is now completely useless to me. I'm going to purchase one of the autofeeders with the reservoir bin that drops food into a bowl, cut the bottom out of the bowl, and mount the thing HIGH on the wall where my dog cannot reach it. It'll drop the food onto the floor and he can have a blast cleaning it up. I think this is the only way I'm going to be able to get any of these things to work with him.