Like most cats, our cat is part adorable, part pain in the ass.
And there’s no bigger ‘pain in the ass time’ than that time of morning that’s too early to be awake, but once you’re awake, too early to fall back asleep for any shut eye of any value. In addition to that, our cat Charlie absolutely can’t stand a closed door.
So – after enduring months of banging on our bedroom door at various times between 5 and 6:30am for a morning feeding that originally started as no earlier than 7:30am – I finally gave in and started researching automated pet feeders.
Being the tech nerd that I am though, I had to have something that was app controlled. Why? Who knows. But for whatever reason it was important to me. So that ruled out basically everything under $100 that probably would have done a more than adequate job. And, of course, being an Apple-guy, I really wanted something that was HomeKit compatible. Again, why? Again, who knows.
Unfortunately, I almost immediately had to drop my HomeKit requirement. I am sure if I looked hard enough, or opened my wallet far enough, I could have found something that worked with HomeKit, but my initial search came up empty, so I resigned myself to having to be stuck with whatever awful first-party app that came with whatever feeder I ended up buying.
After a couple days of reading and re-reading Amazon reviews – which is a very untrustworthy experience to begin with – I finally settled on the WOPET 6L Automatic Cat Feeder,Wi-Fi Enabled Smart Pet Feeder for Cats and Dogs,Auto Dog Food Dispenser with Portion Control, Distribution Alarms and Voice Recorder Up to 15 Meals per Day.
How did I decide? Well, for one, I liked that it had an app. Surprisingly (to me), finding app controlled Pet Feeders was not full of 1000s of choices like I thought it would be. Second, I liked that the feeder and the app let you adjust portion sizes per feeding and/or on demand. Third, I liked how this model let you schedule anywhere up to 15 different feedings a day. And finally, I liked that you could load up a lot of food into the ‘hopper’ and the app would notify you when the food level got low.
All in all, when I finally decided that this feeder was the one, I was pretty happy with my decision. And, even though I take reviews with a massive grain of salt, the reviews for the unit were generally positive. However, would it live up to the hype and my expectations when I set it up? Or would Charlie immediately hate her robot overlord and continue to pester me for food with early morning wake up calls?
Well, after about a month of use, I am thrilled to report that this WOPET model is everything (HomeKit support aside) that I could have asked for.
Initial setup consisted of downloading a sketchy looking – but in actuality, a perfectly good – app, and connecting the device to our home wifi. This was all seamless and the next step was to load it up with food and do a test run to figure out how many portions of food were appropriate for slightly tubby (but much less tubby) Charlie.
This was really the only step of the process I didn’t like. The portion sizes for the WOPET are simply numbered 1-15. There’s no indication if a portion 1 is 1/8 of a cup, or 17 cups of food. You basically have to dispense it and measure for yourself like a barbarian. For the record, I found that a portion size of 5 is approx equal to 1/4 cup.
Once I figured out the appropriate portion size for lil Charlie, the next step was to set up a feeding schedule. Previously, Charlie was on a 2x day morning and dinner feeding schedule. And for about 1.5 hours prior to each feeding time she would start bugging me to be fed – either by waking me up, or sitting on my computer or pestering whoever was cooking dinner for her to be fed. So after playing around with times and portions, I finally settled on a 4x/day schedule – 6am, noon, 6pm, midnight.
Well – let me say that thanks to the WOPET 6L Pet Feeder, peace and good sleep has been returned to my house. Charlie has completely embraced her robo-feeder and no longer pesters any of us in the morning for a feeding. She’s still getting used to the fact that someone being with 10 feet of her dish doesn’t mean she’s being fed, but we’re getting there. And man, is it hilarious to see her leap up from wherever she is and sprint to the feeder every 6 hours.
Even though she’s lost some weight over the last year, I still laugh every time I hear the freight train that is Charlie barrelling through the house at the first sound of a piece of kibble hitting the plastic dish.
So far, I am extremely happy with this pet feeder. The app has been solid, no feedings have been missed and it’s easy enough to adjust times or portions as necessary. The 6L capacity of the food hopper is still chugging through food, so I can’t comment yet on whether the ‘food low’ reminder works, but since everything else about this product has been delightful, I imagine that reminders will also work without issue.
Bottom line: if you have a cat or small dog and you’re tired of being pestered for food, buy one of these immediately. It’s brought peace, consistency and a little bit of extra sleep to our house and made Charlie an even happier cat.