Micro chip operated feeder

[Plump82]

Does anyone have one and would you recommend it?
We have sibling cats. Gilbert is a huge, long legged, hungry boy and will gobble his food down then start on Fredas. We feed her separately away from Gilbert but sometimes she doesnt even start her food right away and i think would prefer to graze.
Ive looked at the feeders but they're so expensive! So don't want to shell out and discover they're rubbish!

If it’s the sureflap their stuff seems pretty reliable with good aftersales.

I never had cause to use any of it though, my cat was an only.

Ive not looked at specific brands yet but I'll look out this one.

There’s a thread on here today about this.

We have the sure Petcare feeders. We were given them for our 2 as one needed to be on a serious diet, so to stop him stealing the others food we got these feeders. They are really helpful in controlling who eats what!

Are they, er, robust enough to withstand attack from a hungry and disgruntled cat? We used to have a feeder with a timer that our old cat dismantled in disgust one weekend, had a very happy hour and then I assume starved for 23 hours.

Watching this thread. I have a similar pair. One grazer, the other one with absolutely no stop button and a yowl when hungry that's got her the nickname of foghorn. She has been known to break into full bags of crunchies.

We have feeders with a timer which work well but not really what we need as he could still eat her food.

We used the sureflap one - it worked brilliantly, and Dcat was more than happy to use it. The sensor/wall on it also seemed to help a little in preventing the other cats intimidating her while she ate - normally the ones who didn't just shove her out of the way would tower over her until she ran off.
Our greediest cat never managed to get into it, and most of the others soon stopped bothering when they realised that they couldn't get at the food.

Unfortunately though after a few weeks his brother (less greedy but much more intelligent) worked out how to take the lid off - we thought perhaps it had been an accident/lucky chance at first but after a few repeat incidences we stopped using it and just went back to separating the cats. (Annoyingly as our smallest Dcat would also clearly prefer to graze, and takes forever to eat!).

The lid is pretty sturdy when closed so can't be gotten off by force, but can be prised off by a determined or intelligent cat. When open it's a bit more vulnerable to having the lid pulled off, but cats are less likely to try it then. I've also heard people say their cats can take advantage of the sensor - the lid won't close whilst something is in the way so if another cat can get their head/a paw in the bowl before the lid closes then they can get around it.

So in short - the sureflap one at least works well, is fairly robust, and will probably stop most cats getting at the food, but it's not completely foolproof. It does work well for insect prevention, though!