I bought this item because I was going on vacation and wanted to spare my relatives the bother of feeding my fish. I liked the fact that this feeder has a large hopper which will allow me to feed the fish for the extended period I am away. Given its size and the number of feedings I have programmed, I expect I could be gone a month and not run out of food. (I have a 39 gal. tank with about a dozen fish.)
In any case I got it early and set it up on my tank to make sure it would work properly and therefore tried it out for about 3-4 weeks before I went on vacation. It seems to work as advertized. The only problem I encountered was that the hopper extending into the tank tended to fog up with the tank hood completely closed. When it fogged up, the food got stuck to the hopper and as time went by it totally clogged up. I solved the problem by propping the tank hood open about 3/4 of an inch, which allows the vapor to escape the tank and so now it does not fog up. Again testing it for about 2 weeks in this mode it seemed to work fine and the food did not stick to the hopper. I am now on vacation and only time will tell if the fish feeder did its job. Hopefully I'll return to well fed and thriving fish.
I used this product to feed a 10 pound cat dry food morsels. I used the feeder for exactly 1 year (before the cat died). My cat was an obsessive eater. She would make our lives miserable by begging, rather attacking us for food; waking us up 4 hours before breakfast and purposefully ruining anything we were doing 2 hours or more before dinnertime. We had tried two other automatic feeders during the previous 10 years and she had broken into the two other automatic cat food dishes in no time (one she broke into within minutes). She did not thwart this feeder, she really only tried twice to break into it but gave up fairly quickly and never tried again. I had purchased the chute, which is an accessory, which may or may not have been needed to thwart her attempts. The feeder, itself is much smaller than the pictures reveal, which is a good thing.
I had the one hopper (it comes with) and purchased one additional "hopper extension." So, my feeder had a total of two square plastic "hopper" pieces. With the hopper and one hopper extension, I only had to fill the feeder up once a week, which was an unexpected liberating bonus. It was incredibly nice not to worry about twice-a-day feedings or even filling up the feeder daily (unless the power went out).
Generally, a problem with any hopper style feeder is you can only put one type of food in the machine, so they are eating only one flavor/brand all week. (We tried layering foods, but each food was different in size, so that did not work with this feeder.) And a specific problem with this feeder, for cat food, was it took about 10 minutes to set the hopper each time the morsel shape of the food changed (to unplug it from the timer, move it away from the cat, and actually set, test, reset, and retest the amount dropped). And to set the feeder, it required a high level of precision, since one tiny movement of the setting, altered the amount of food it would drop dramatically. Then, once I set the feeder with the precision of a watch maker, the amount of food dropped each feeding was inconsistent. I was required to set with precision, but the feeder dropped within a range of amounts. Generally, by the end of the week, I liked to think each feeding averaged out to the correct amount (of a 1/2 cup per day).
I also found that when the hopper was full/near full or it had 20% or less left in the hopper, it dropped out a lot more than it was set to drop. When it was only 20% full, the feeder ran the risk of dropping every morsel of food remaining in the hopper. I just learned to keep it 20% or more full. When it was full or near full, the weight of the food in the two-piece high hopper seemed to push a greater amount of food out (than it was set to drop).
The feeder did work, in that the cat could not get into it, it fed her sufficiently, and within a week of owning the feeder, the cat learned the feeder fed her and not us, so she quit waking us up daily at 4AM for 8AM breakfast or aggressively begging for food and annoying us 2 hours before dinner daily. The feeder did separate us from the food in the cats' mind, which made our lives unbelievably better. The last year we had the feeder with her, our lives improved tremendously. Glad we bought it.
Buy Super Feeder ASF-1 Aquarium Feeder with Analog Timer (style may vary) Smoke Color and Holds 4 and 3 Now
Recently purchased this for my cats and am very happy with it. It was much smaller then I had anticipated but this turned out to be a good thing. If you have cats that bug you allot for food then THIS IS THE FEEDER FOR YOU! This Super Feeder is perfect for feeding cats and many other types of small animals. Built in Texas no China like most of these kinds of things.
Read Best Reviews of Super Feeder ASF-1 Aquarium Feeder with Analog Timer (style may vary) Smoke Color and Holds 4 and 3 Here
this is another item you can not find in your local store. love this in my tank. my grandson loves to see him move only promblem need to be a little more heavier so he will not keep floating to top had to build so much rocks on him to keep him down in tank
