This feeder worked okay while I was away for a week over the holidays. As some reviewers have written, the drum does have plastic snaps that you need to lift carefully but mine are still attached and working. You just need to be gentle. I imagine I could just tape the drum back on when they finally do break.This is not a precision instrument, but that was okay. In fact I think the mechanism is the same as a little AA-battery travel-clock, but instead of the hands of a clock it turns a drum which you load with food. A scoop/chute inside the drum can be adjusted so that its angle scoops up a little more or less food on each rotation, depending on your needs. Then, as the drum rotates, that amount of food gets dropped out the chute end which you've carefully positioned over your tank through a couple of days of observation. You have to allow for an opening of a couple of inches in your hood because it drops the food all along the last couple of inches of its rotation, which is fine. Actually this came in handy because I was using it over a smaller tank and at the lowest portion setting it wasn't really working with my food mix, so I had to go with a higher portion setting which would have been way too much food for my small tank. Solution? Aiming the device so it dropped a bunch of the food to the side of the hood opening, just allowing some of it to fall into the tank. Definitely allow a couple of days' practice with the device before you go away. I placed a tin foil "cup" in the hole of my hood to catch the food at different settings and at different positions until I was happy with both the reliability of the scooping mechanism and the amount that was being caught in the cup (which would become the amount delivered to my fish once I removed it, but you have to experiment). I used two of these feeders on a couple of small 5 gallon tanks for a week, and all fish survived. One worked perfectly and the water was even clear upon my return. The other I'd aimed a little "off" and the water was cloudy (too much food delivered) but my fancy goldfish Mugsy was alive and well, just needed a partial water changed and a bunch of food vacuumed off the floor around his tank.
The device is probably of greater value to a larger tank where the full amount of food it dispenses reliably will be readily consumed by the larger number of fish. I did not get to use this in my 20 gallon tank as I had someone willing to check it and do feedings, but my sense is that it would have been fine there.
Final verdict? It works okay. Experiment till you know the device inside and out with your particular food and tank setup. It's not difficult, just time consuming because to see it actually operate you need to let it run at its own pace. (Turning it by hand gave me different results than watching it in action.) If you are torn between the reliability of an auto-feeder and a well-meaning fish sitter friend, set up the feeder to dispense the bare minimum to keep your tank alive, then have your friend check in, say twice a week with instructions on feeding one small portion each visit if the fish seem hungry and the water seems clear. (Although if you have such a friend, you may not even need to use a feeder at all.)
Remember, the feeder delivers food twice a day no matter what, so set the portions to half of what you want your fish to eat every day, and they get that twice each day (remember: clock mechanism).
Good luck!
Good for about 2 years.
Be careful opening food chamber as the plastic tabs are made very cheaply and will break if you bend to far.
Again,, it is made as about cheap as you can make a product but, it will rotate twice a day for about 2 years, and only on about 3 battery changes.
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it's hard to tell if it's working, so i sometimes feed the fish. of course, this negates the purpose of the automatic feeder. i would not recommend it.Read Best Reviews of Daily Double Feeder II w/ FREE Fish Food Here
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