Are the Surefeed MICROCHIP PET FEEDERS worth it?

[Music] this is jimmy the greek and with his help and of course the four others we're going to take a look at those microchip pet feeders and see if they're worth it what do you think [Music] jim [Music] when you've got five cats it can get a little bit complicated when it comes to their food especially if they have different dietary needs actually having two cats can be quite complicated if one of them needs to be on a special diet when that happens you can't leave open bowls of food out anymore and even if you put the names of the cats on the bowls for some reason the others don't seem to respect that [Music] in this video i'll be sharing with you my experiences with the show pets microchip feeders both the standard ones and the connect ones i will show you why you should or shouldn't get the more expensive connect one by going through the differences some of the features could be really useful for you or they could be completely unnecessary they've helped me so much with the problem of making sure each of my cats gets the right food just so you know i bought all of these feeders myself and this video has no connection to sure pet themselves so what i'm doing in this video is simply sharing with you my experiences i'm sure some of you will disagree with how i do things and that's fine i look forward to seeing those in the comments what i do works for me and my cats and that's the most important thing so my five are on three different diets and it's important that they stick to that jimmy the greek and lollipop are easy that both young cats run around loads and have no issues whatsoever with food harriet like jimmy is a rescue cat from ski athos and do make sure you watch my scare thoughts kittens documentary series on this channel to see their stories and learn more about the island of the cats you're so cute jimmy was a kitten when i adopted him so good to see you again but harriet was an adult how old is hard to say but the vet's estimated 18 months to two years old she started putting on weight a few months after i brought her to england and it's not uncommon for former rescue cats to overeat but jimmy shows that's not always the case but then again harriet spent much longer looking for food and making the most of it when she found some so she probably still has that in her in scathos she ate everything i gave her but in england she is without question the fussiest cat i have ever known when it comes to food she doesn't like wet food she doesn't like treats in fact for a long time she ate just one specific type of dry food nothing else so she's been on a controlled diet for about 18 months she gets exactly what she needs by using the sure pet feeders but she still has a tendency to put on weight if i don't use them properly so then it's reduced portions much to her disgust then there's my wonderful siamese twins bertie and percy who've just turned 14. betty percy i'm not going to go into their full story of what happened to them in this video as it's too upsetting they both got very sick two years ago from the same thing that took my beloved noodle from me it took a long time for them to get over this and they lost about two kilograms in weight and one of the things they developed was gastrointestinal issues they've been on special food since then and are thankfully slowly getting back to a healthy weight percy especially he's doing better than bertie but hopefully bertie will get there so i have two cats who can eat anything two cats who can no longer eat everything and one cat who wants to eat everything so that's why i got the shoe pet microchip feeders [Music] now if you've only got one cat you absolutely do not need these these are for multi-cat households where you need to keep their food separate for whatever reason there's two different types of the microchip feeders the standard one and the connect version i'll explain the differences as we go through the features and the setup of them both of them work with cats which have been microchipped which mine have of course or via an rfid tag that the cat needs to wear on their collar once the cat has been registered to that feeder via the microchip or the tag it will only open for that cat much to the annoyance of the others [Music] so no matter how many times harriet sniffs at the other feeders they will not open for her sorry harriet to register your cat with the standard feeder you simply press the add cat button on the back the cover will open and you get a flashing green light then you put your cat underneath the top bit which is the reader until the green light goes solid [Music] if you have the connect version it's super easy barely an inconvenience to add or remove them using the app and being able to remove them is really useful if you need to temporarily restrict them from eating [Music] hi jim now sure pet recommend using one feeder per cat but you can actually register up to 32 cats per machine one man 32 cats no that's a bit much for me if you are trying to separate individual cats diets and one per cat is kind of obvious but there are situations where having cats share feeders is no problem let's use my cats as the obvious examples as harriet is on her weight loss diet she has her own feeder because i need to keep track of exactly how much she's eating bertie and percy though they can share feeders as they're both on the same special diet no guys not like that thank you that's better they in fact have more than one feeder they have a couple for dry food one for wet food and a spare one for when i need it lollipop and jimmy also share feeders because they have no specific diet but i still need to keep their food separate from the others if your cats are sharing the standard feeders then of course you won't be able to keep track of exactly how much each of them is eating this may or may not be important to you but it is for me when it comes to birth especially because i need to make sure that he gets enough food because he's the one who's been having the most issues [Music] but instead of him and percy having individual feeders so i can monitor that i use the connect ones because it solves that issue [Music] because it's connected to an app hence the name connect it saves the data of when each cat has been using the feeder and how much they've eaten this is the main benefit of the connect version it can tell how much each cat is eaten as they have scales in them before you put food in them you do need to make sure that the scales are zeroed so they are accurate this is simply done by putting an empty bowl on them and pressing the reset scale button on the back the led lights will go from fully illuminated to none then you can put their food in and the led lights on the scales will illuminate these lights are set for a specific way that you determine in the app via the portion size with the connect version there's two options with the scales you can have a single scale which measures the whole bowl or you can have two separate scales with two single bowls as they can have two different types of food in there if you really want to keep track of exactly who is eating what type of food so harriet currently gets 80 grams of her special dry food today and her portion size is set to 40 grams so that's what she gets in the morning and then in the evening so the scale lights will fully illuminate when there's 40 grams in there i actually normally give her a bit less than that maybe about 30 grams each time so then i can give her a little extra through the day because she's always giving me her sad face and she knows i can't resist that [Music] so do you want these when i'm home they don't just get their food out of the feeders though i like to feed them i guess manually especially when it comes to the catkin fresh food i should probably explain what catkin is at this point it's a very high quality fresh food that has 95 real meat content there are at the time of me making this video seven different recipes they send you a box with 28 days worth of food in the packets which are frozen by them before sending out so i put them in the freezer [Music] now i don't get five boxes of these as i simply don't have the freezer space i get two and it is mostly bertie and percy who eat them i really think the catkin food has really helped improve their health and it's such a joy to see him really enjoy his food and eat so well because i worry about him so much [Music] point for you mate the quality of the ingredients is so high that apparently you can eat them yourself i haven't tried because i don't eat meat cost wise it works out at just under two pounds a day per cat so not cheap cheap but not outrageous either this video isn't sponsored by them i just think they're really good and if you're in the uk and want to give their two-week trial box a go here's a nice hefty discount code [Music] getting my cats used to eating from these feeders was pretty easy using the training mode you enable it via the button on the back and a flashing amber light shows you it's on mode 1 is essentially a fully open flap press the training button again and you're in mode two which closes a little bit and will fully open when the cat goes close to the feeder which will get them used to the noise and the movement mode three is half closed and mode 4 is almost closed don't rush through the training make sure your cats are fine in each stage before moving to the next one you don't want to scare them off and once the training is all done hopefully they will just use them if you have any issues like this with one of your cats eating out the bowl they're not supposed to you can get a rare cover because it doesn't matter so much that jimmy eats this food i haven't bothered one of the biggest pains with them by far is cleaning them after all they are electronic please don't put them in a dishwasher you can put the bowls in the dishwasher but not the whole feeder so this is how i clean them [Music] do [Music] the connect version costs roughly 20 more than the standard version but that doesn't include the hub that you need to have although you only need one hub per house not one hub per feeder but you do need to factor that cost in i actually use my hub not just for the feeders but for the microchip pet or connect that goes from the kitchen to the casio but i'll talk about that in the upcoming catio video my only real negatives apart from the pain that it is to actually clean them is i do have the occasional quirk with the app when i look at their history of eating there's some occasional really big spikes of what they've eaten and there's no way harriet has eaten that much on that day or jimmy has eaten that much in that day in fact on this week it's kind of crazy how off it is on a number of the days you can see from the other weeks what he normally eats and there's not even that amount of food in the feeders on each day so i don't understand it but thankfully this does seem to be rare and most of the time it appears to be pretty accurate so i don't know what is going on it could be because i'm not always resetting the scales i'll look into this and if i find an answer i'll put it in the description [Music] so which one should you get well that really comes down to whether you feel you could benefit from the features of the connect and the app personally i love that ability to track exactly what they're eating even if i do have a couple of bugs right now but also being able to add and remove the cats from the feeders it's so useful if you need to restrict what they're eating say one of them needs to go to the vet the next day if you don't feel you need any of the features that it offers you then save yourself some money and just get the standard one [Music] overall i think they're great and i really don't know how i would cope without them if i had to give them food individually it would be an absolute nightmare especially as they like to graze throughout the day rather than eat in one go well apart from harriet who tends to eat everything up straight away but it doesn't stop her keep going back to the feeder to see if there's magically any more in there and she'll sit by her feeder and wait and wait and wait and wait she won't move until she has her food not for anything [Music] there is one thing that isn't dry food that she does love and that's fresh chicken not just any fresh chicken it has to be roast chicken and not just any roast chicken you get a pre-roasted chicken forget it i have to roast it myself and then she'll be over the moon she is one strange cat [Music] but i love her beyond words [Music] [Music] you

Channel: One Man Five Cats

Views: 64,562

Keywords: skiathos, greece, cat, cats, siamese, calico, one eye, one eyed, rescue cat, surepet, surefeed, microchip, rfid, cat feeders, cat bowls, review, reviews, philip bloom, one man five cats, 1 man 5 cats, burmese, black cat, black, pet products, food, katkin

Id: tt29Qw7mz3s

Length: 16min 54sec (1014 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 16 2020