Automatic Feeder

Status
Not open for further replies.
arozeboom

arozeboom

Very Active Member
What kind do you have and what are the pros & cons of it?

I've been getting up at 4:00 AM to pick up Ruby's food bowl and its getting to wear on me already. I'm thinking of an auto feeder.

I would need to get two, one for her and one for our civvie so Ru doesn't raid that bowl. They can both be skittish and don't like sudden noises, so the quieter the better.
Also, no ticking sounds. That would drive me nuts, too.

Thanks
Amy & Ruby
 
Everyone has their favorite. We like our PetSafe5. It is the only one our cats have not been able to break into, it's easy to program and very flexible in terms by programming by the clock, not how much time between feedings and comes with 5 sections, not just 2-3. Not cheap. We got ours at PetSmart but you might get a better deal on the Internet.
 
Are the wells very deep? Ruby has some trouble with the soft food...she ends up mashing it into the bottom of the bowl with her snout and I have to stir it up every now and then so she can get to it. Her bowl is really shallow. I worry if the wells are too deep she'll have trouble getting to the food.

(I tried just putting the "puck" of food in her bowl and not mashing it up at all...she just stared at it and meowed woefully. Poor thing had no idea how to eat it.)
 
http://www.petmountain.com/product/elec ... eeder.html

This is the one I have. I actually have 2, one for FD and one for civvie. I set the time to go off between 10-11 am and 3-4pm. The timer is not exact, and it's marked in hours, as in from the time you set it. I haven't had a problem with them and like them because they have an ice pack for the bottom. It does make a ticking noise, but I don't hear it unless I pick up the unit and put it near my face/ear. The tops pop open, and only make a noise if I put the unit to close to the side of the island - then it's hitting the maple.
 
I need one that will basically turn to an empty compartment or close all together. My goal is to make sure she doesn't eat for about 2 hours prior to her shot time because she spikes quite a bit with food.
 
The PetSafe has a top that revolves to the next compartment. (That's what makes it so hard to break into. :mrgreen: ) So you could set it to open at 3pm and then revolve to the next empty compartment by 5pm (or whatever time frames you want)
 
We have the petsafe 5 compartment one .. Mocha can eat out of the bowls without any problems, and they are deeper then her regular daytime bowls she eats out of. It's pretty quiet, I never heard it going off at night, but mocha sure did :-D
 
I'm seeing reviews that its not hard for them to pull (or push?) open to get to the next compartment. Any problems with that?
 
I haven't had a problem and I had a determined cat. He had defeated 3 other feeders. They are pretty good about taking it back if it has a problem. My first one had a clock issue, but I have had this one for 5 years with no issues.
 
The catmate c20 is probably the less noisy automatic feeder. Any round shape feeder has a motor, which means pretty noisy. Any model with top openings instead of a rotating system will be less scary for a nervous cat. If I were you I'd go to the store to see and listen to the feeder in person.

Otherwise someone on this forum had the most brilliant idea, and it has been my routine for couple of days now: freezing the food! My cat eats one can a day. So every morning I open a can and mix water with it. Then I serve one half right away (the water will keep it moist) and freeze the other half. When frozen the food remains too cold for about 2 or 3 hours and then just perfect for the rest of the day. From my experience, I can confirm that 10 hours after the food has been out of the freezer it'll still be fresh
 
My problem is that I need all the food to be gone 2 hours before her shot. She's a grazer so I don't worry about her gobbling it all up at once. I just need to make sure she doesn't go back to graze between +10 and +12. Right now the husband picks up the bowls in the afternoon and I get up at 3:30 AM to pick them up before her AM shot. It would be way nice to not have to get up 2 hours before I need to!
 
does she normaly finish her meal? If so how long does her ration lasts?

Cuz I'm thinking ( I need other lantus users to confirm here) that with a slow acting insulin Like lantus, you could just feed your cat one hour prior to the shot and not worry too much if you know she's gonna finish her meal one or 2 hours later?

If you test and feed +1h later inject insulin you might not have to worry...

Any lantus users can confirm?
 
She's on Lantus. She's a food spiker and a grazer.

I put out her food and she'll eat about half of right away. Then she goes back around "lunch" and has some more and of the time, a late snack. If she eats too close her shot time though, her BG is wonky because its affected by the food she ate.

What I want to do is get any food left her in bowl out of reach about 2 hours before she is due for her shot, without having to get up, move the bowl and then try to get another 90 minutes of sleep before I need to get ready for work. Right now I'm rarely getting to sleep before midnight so getting up after three and a half hours of sleep is taking its toll on me. When you touch her bowl, that signals to her that its time to eat. If I touch it at 3:30 in the morning, she'll keep trying to get me to get back up and give her breakfast.
 
Sorry I was editing my message while you were replying!
Here's what I wanted to ask :
does she normaly finish her meal? If so how long does her ration lasts?

Cuz I'm thinking ( I need other lantus users to confirm here) that with a slow acting insulin Like lantus, you could just feed your cat one hour prior to the shot and not worry too much if you know she's gonna finish her meal one or 2 hours later?

If you test and feed +1h later inject insulin you might not have to worry...

Any lantus users can confirm?
Click to expand...
 
Even with lantus we like to keep kitties from eating within a 2 hour range of PS tests .. at least, that is what I like to do with mocha ..

Mocha wasn't ever able to get the lid to rotate so she could get into the other bowls of food but not sure how determined she was to try .. she's kinda lazy :oops: With the 5 compartment one, you could always leave one of the bowls empty, so that is the one that rotates 2 hours before her shot time .. so even though it rotates, no food is in it .. but that means you're down to just 4 compartments to use, and when you put the feeder down, one compartment is always exposed .. make sense?
 
I really only need two compartments...I don't worry about how much she eats other than keeping her out of it for those last 2 pre-shot hours.
My plan was that I would just leave the last compartment empty.
 
The Petsafe feeder with 5 sections is more convenient as it is better for the cat's bg numbers to have more frequent, smaller meals. With 5 sections, you can divide the total amount of food into 4 mini meals or even 2 small meals and 2 snacks, and leave the 5th section empty.
 
arozeboom, on Ruby's spreadsheet if you dont mention something about her not finishing her meal right away, does it mean she did eat half of her ration twice a day right before her injection?

In the meantime, can you place her food right next to your bed so you just have to put something on her dish (a heavy plate of something) to keep her from eating. That means you wouldn't have to get up, open the light ect...

If I were you I'd do two things :

1- Look carefully at the BG curves you've made or maybe do another curve to see how her food intake affects her BG. For exemple : 1 oz of food equals +100 BG 1 hours after intake.
My own cat has NEVER EVER finish her half portion of food before an injection (she was on Caninsulin though). Even when my vet did her BG curve all the numbers were based on 1/4, or 1/3 of what she should have been eating. When I was lucky she would eat half but then eat the other half in like 20 small meals. It drove me crazy, until I took a close look at the numbers and realized the quantity of food (I'm not talking about the extremes heres, like no food at all or an entire can of food), but the difference between 1/3 and 1/2 did not make a difference important enough to make a change in the insulin dose. Of course this is a personal experience, not the same insulin, my cat eats PurinaDm not yours, not same age, ect etc and all cats are different! But I remember being in your exact situation and hear something my vet once said when I told her I couldn't sleep becuz of my cat's problem with food Vs insulin... she said : "how can a 13 year old cat that has been eating multiple meals each day of her life, suddenly has a stomach big enough to eat only 2 times a day? It's impossible, or you have to start with 8 meals, then 5 then 3 etc, on y long period, and still some cats wont accept it!"
As long as my cat ate between 1/3 and 1/2 of her ration she told me to do a normal injection.

2- When you have the BG curve with the numbers showing how much a specific quantity of food affects the BG levels, why not start a new topic in the lantus section of this forum and ask if maybe you could let your cat eat the half of the portion she wont eat at once, the way she wants and still manage her BG levels?
viewforum.php?f=9
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top