This is a great item! Sometimes I work late, and one of my cats is on a wet food only diet. He was always hangry when I got home, then he would usually overeat his next feeding and throw up all over the place.

With this item, I'm able to give him meals at more regular intervals, and we are both much happier.

So what I do is prepare one feeding the night before and put it in the freezer, and make sure the ice pack is in the freezer also. In the morning before I leave I place the frozen food and the ice pack in the feeder and set the timer, usually for 6-8 hours. My cat is very picky about the freshness of his food, which he should be, and he's never snubbed any of the food I put in there.

Easy to use. It does make a slight ticking noise, like a clock, so you do have to remove the batteries if you don't want to listen to it. You can only hear it in a very quiet room, and only if you are within a few feet of it.

This has saved my sleep (and marriage)!

My cat demands to be fed at 4 am every morning, and despite research, reading up on animal behavior and talking to vets, she'll stop briefly, but continue waking us up a few weeks later. This unit allows me to use the ice pack and set up her breakfast of wet food without worry it'll spoil overnight and opens at a specific time. She definitely bats it around and chews it trying to get it to open sooner, but it's great at staying closed until the allotted time. I wouldn't use it to feed on an elevated surface (unless you bolted it down or otherwise secured the base to the surface, there are actually holes for this I believe in the base) as falling off a counter will cause it to pop open, but since that seems pretty normal I won't deduct stars.
This is my second unit purchased, and the first one still technically works, but it was about 5 years old and very beat up looking from her chewing on the sides. Again, won't deduct stars for that as it was literally used 365 days a year for 5 years, and any plastic item that gets used that much will look old! Also, in that time I maybe went through 2-3 AA batteries, so inexpensive to operate as well.

The only complaints I have are:
1. I haven't been able to find additional bowls sold separately to replace them/have extras. As with all plastic bowls, eventually they retain microbes/bacteria no matter how much you wash them and can cause chin acne in cats. I'd like to be able to replace the bowls without buying a whole new unit.
2. The older unit had an "on-off" switch next to the battery so if we took her on a trip with us, we could just turn off the unit and save the battery, in this version you don't have the switch and need to remove the battery. I would also ask that they add a cover to the battery compartment as (at least in the older version, hasn't happened with this one yet) if she bats it around the battery did occasionally come loose, causing the unit to not open on time. Solved with duct tape, but shouldn't have to be done.

All in all, highly recommend, but Ani Mate, please offer the bowls separately online here on Amazon!

We were going out of town for four days and needed a way to feed a cat that is spoiled on the wet food. We didn't want to come home to pissed-off cat that had to lower herself to eat dry food, after all. This seemed to be a good solution but I was nervous that it would fail and not open at the appropriate times. It arrived a day before we were going to leave so I really didn't have time to test it.

Well, it worked flawlessly.

I'm not sure about the point of the ice pack. It's no better than any other ice pack that loses it's cold after a few hours so if you're setting the timer for 48 hours it's not really doing a whole lot of good. Better than nothing, I suppose.

The removable trays are nice, though. It makes it easy to clean without having to fumble the whole thing around in the sink being careful not to get water into the mechanical bits. You can even throw them in the dishwasher. Very good feature!

Oh, and the cat was still pissed off when we got home. But at least she was pissed off and well fed.

It's fine when it works, but a cat-astrophe when it fails. I've used it about a dozen times. It was getting difficult to get it started. Put the battery in and crank the timer dials around. I can hear it ticking, but the dials don't move. My pet sitter had a hard time with it when I was away for a couple of weeks. Then, I mistakenly thought I had it going when I went away for the weekend, only to discover on my return that my poor kitty had been starving because the dials never moved and lids never opened.

I think this is just another sad example of an excellent product manufactured in the US and UK, but when they shifted to making it in China it lost all quality (and quality control) and is now coasting along on the good reviews from the previous manufacturing process.

I'm going to check out what that 3-year guarantee covers, and will tell my pet sitting service (who recommended this product) about my experience.

It simply works. I needed to go out of town for the weekend, but needed to be sure the cats were fed since one is elderly and can only eat wet food. This device is super-simple and therefore dependable. The little knobs make one complete rotation every 48 hours and the little peg on the knob will release the spring-loaded door at the time set anywhere between 0 and 48 hours This mechanism is a lot like those $5 mechanical Christmas light timers in that regard.

To be reasonably sure that the food would not spoil, I froze both trays solid and used the included ice pack for refrigeration. This worked for a weekend and only by starting out stone cold frozen would I trust that the food would not spoil at the end of the weekend. The ice pack is just kind of there and these trays and covers are not insulated at all.

I fed the cats manually that morning and set the first door to open the next morning. I watched the tray remotely via an internal security camera I have (separately) that triggers off of motion detection. At various point throughout the day the cats visited and revisited the tray and I saw that most of that day's food was gone. The next morning the 2nd tray opened on time and the cats took to it just as well. Both trays held plenty of food for both cats for both days.