At one point in time, you will go on vacation and will have no choice but to leave your fish unattended. Fish, like us, get hungry too. They are animals. They need food. So do they just die of hunger? Well, maybe I exaggerated there a little bit, but then again, these circumstances are almost, always, a cause of concern for every fish keeper.
So what do you do? Well, advancements in fish keeping technology got you covered. Automated Fish Feeders actually exist!
Now before we dive in this relatively new technology, let’s first discuss how it works. For the purpose of this discussion, we will go through the following topics to help u understand how the Automatic Fish Feeder works;
What does it do?
How does it work?
How do I operate it?
Advantages
Disadvantages
Examples of automatic fish feeder products
What does it do?
In a nutshell, automatic fish feeders are devices a fish keeper can install on their existing tank set-ups so that they could feed the fish with very little human intervention. These contraptions help ease the task of manually feeding fish every day. It is designed to save both time and effort when it comes to feeding your fish.
How does it work?
Automatic fish feeders are mostly battery operated machines that lets you load various chambers certain amount of food that will be given later to your fish. These chambers are then set to be released inside the tank depending on the preferred time set by the fish keeper. When using these machines, the fish keeper must always be conscious of the time when all the food is depleted.
How to operate
These machines are relatively straightforward to operate. First, the automatic fish feeder should be installed on the tank. Take not that some may require specific placements to work properly. Afterwards, each chamber should be loaded with the desired amount of food the fish keeper wants to feed to his/her fish every meal. Once all chambers are loaded, the time when food is to be released to the tank is set by the fish keeper. These are the usual times when the fish inside the tank are fed.
The battery life should be checked periodically to avoid loss of power. More importantly, the machine should be checked regularly as well to see if it is working properly to avoid prolonged future accidents.
Advantages
The main advantage the automatic fish feeder gives you is that you do not have to spend time daily to feed your fish as it already does that for you. You will only have to check on it on days where the food chambers are set to run out. The ease the when feeding the automatic fish feeder provides is, indeed, yet to be matched thus far.
Furthermore, it helps you be more consistent when feeding. In both amount of food fed to the feeding schedule, this machine greatly improves the consistency. Since the food is prepared on an earlier date, the amount placed on each feeding chamber is more likely to be consistent than, say for example, getting from food containers by hand.
Disadvantages
Like every aquarium related product, it comes with some disadvantages. The first glaring disadvantage is that, in the event of a breakage in the machine like when the battery runs out, the fish will not be fed or worse, become overfed due to mechanical malfunction. Like the old saying goes, “a fish is better off starving than being overfed” as it might lead to ammonia spikes and the like causing major complications.
Secondly, over-reliance to this machine might cause too much complacency on the part of the fish keeper. In turn, this might cause him to completely neglect periodically checking the machine and the parameters of the tank altogether. One must remember that even though such machines are designed to make life easier for the fish keeper, they still need to be checked religiously periodically to ensure that they are working properly.
Examples
Hydor Automatic Feeder
When it comes to build and design, the Hydor Automatic Fish Feeder is one of the best built of it’s kind. It may be set to 1 to 3 times feeding per day at specific times. It boasts of a battery life of over 9 months. At around $40.00, it is one of the more affordable models out in the market. However, some concerns may arise as installation may require specific positioning. Lastly, it does not have one of the biggest food chambers compared to its competitors.
Rusee Daily Automatic Fish Feeder
The Rusee Daily Automatic fish feeder is probably your best bet if you keep fish with complex eating habits. This battery operated machine can be set to feed your fish up to 6 times per day. This is one of the highest ratio in terms of times per day it may be set to feed. At around the same price range as the Hydor Automatic Feeder, it is affordable as well. Lastly, it can accommodate a wide variety of processed fish food like flakes and pellets.
Eheim Everyday Fish Feeder
Probably the best automatic fish feeders in the market, the Eheim Everyday Fish Feeder is engineered to perfection. It can dispense food to up to 8 times per day. It is well built to keep moisture out of the entire system as well.
The Eheim Everyday Fish Feeder also comes with a universal mounting clamp that can fit virtually any aquarium. It also has a manual “dump” feature that lets you manually release food stored for your fish. Lastly, and probably it’s best feature, is it’s battery life indicator which informs the you when its time to change batteries to avoid the unwanted event of it losing power.