Surefeed Microchip Cat Feeder Review

A few years ago I received a Sureflap cat flap to review and I loved it.  We are still using it today and it does a really good job.  So when the Surefeed Microchip Cat Feeder was launched I was keen to try it and I ended up buying it myself despite the high price tag.  The reason I wanted to try it is that during the summer we have a real problem with fly eggs being laid in our cats’ food.  The conservatory is south-facing so it gets very hot and on warmer days the window are all open, often the door is ajar too.  Inevitably flies get in and when they do they make their way to the kitchen – it’s the next room – and they lay their eggs on the cats’ food. Our cats are grazers.  They have access to their food all the time and have it topped up on request.  Not all cats feed this way, but ours do and it seems to suit them as they are healthy 14-year-old cats who have never had a weight problem.  The downside is that the food is always there.  In winter it isn’t really an issue, but in summer it is.

We got the feeder and started following the instructions.  We set it up to recognise both our cats microchips as they eat the same food.  One of the benefits of the microchip feature is that you can separate out different diets or stop an overweight cat overeating, but we didn’t need to separate ours. You have to train your cat to get used to it.  Ours were already used to the Sureflap cat door, but that only makes a click sound when the door releases and this feeder needed more getting used to.  Basically you can start getting them used to the feeder without any movement or even the removable bowl separately if they are very nervous.  Then you can have the feeder closed a little bit and there is a small amount of movement.  Then you move up to having it nearly closed, but not quite (they will still be able to smell the food this way) and finally having it fully closed.  One of our cats is a fairly slow learner and can be spooked on occasion.  The process took a few weeks.  Once they learnt it kept the flies away – yay!

The main downside of the feeder for me has been the fact that it is difficult to clean.  There are removable bowls and a removable mat at the front (you can even colour code these to suit your decor or to tell the difference between one cat’s feeder and another).  These are easy to clean and you can wash them daily, especially if you have a spare bowl (it came with two a split one – for wet and dry separation I guess – and a single bowl).  The reality is that the food doesn’t always stay in the bowl or on the mat.  One of our cats is a fairly messy eater which doesn’t help.  The picture above is how it typically looks after a few days (I have removed the bowl and the mat so you can see better).  It’s easy enough to brush off any loose bits, but the rest is more difficult to shift.  It would be so much better if you could detach a battery compartment and put the rest in the dishwasher or even the washing up bowl.  You can’t get it too wet because of the batteries and it is really tricky to clear – frankly it’s a pain in the neck.  So much so that I stopped using ours over winter, when we didn’t have the fly issue, and restarted with it this spring.  The trouble was that I have had to retrain the cats to use the feeder all over again.  Sighs!

The cats are happy enough to use the feeder once they have got used to the noise and movement when it opens.  You can just about get two hungry cats in there to feed.  It does get through more batteries than the Sureflap Cat Door, but ours lasted us when we were using it last year and have needed to be replaced this year.  I guess there is more movement involved than with the door (that just has a catch that clicks in or out).  I have noticed that there is a cheaper Surefeed Pet Bowl now available without the microchip arch, but otherwise very similar in design so I think it will have the same cleaning issues.  It is a bit cheaper too presumably because it doesn’t need the microchip technology.

I think there’s a real market for a pet feeder that does what the Surefeed products do in terms of separating pet’s food and keeping it safe from flies.  I just think they need to sort out the cleaning issues. When you are paying that much for a feeder, you want it to be easy and convenient to use. At the moment it’s not quite the product I hoped for, but hopefully it will work for us over the summers at least.  I think all dried food might be the way to go for future cats, but I don’t think this furry pair would let me get away from that (although they do like dry food as well).