SureFeed Microchip Pet Feeder Connect review: Know your pet’s eating habits

1 / 10

Theres only so much you can learn about your pets by watching them, and as wearables have been providing greater insights into our own habits, our furry friends have been somewhat left behind.

Thats where Sure Petcare comes in. The company has been making cat flaps and pet feeders that respond to cat and dog microchips for years, but now its taking this to the next level, with its Connect range of products passing analytics straight to the pet owners phone.

I reviewed the Cat Flap Connect earlier this year, and it impressed. So is the Pet Feeder Connect an essential accompaniment?

SureFeed Microchip Pet Feeder Connect review: What you need to know

2 / 10

The SureFeed Microchip Pet Feeder Connect is a pet bowl that will unlock its contents only for the cat or dog with the correct microchip. When the pet approaches, the lid pulls back smoothly to expose the food within.

The clever bit is that the bundled bowls are on digital scales, meaning that not only can you carefully weigh the recommended amount of food for your pet, but the feeder can calculate how much has been eaten as the bowl becomes lighter.

The above means you have the information you need to learn about your cats eating habits, which could be useful for providing early warning signs of health issues, or be extra handy for cutting a portly puss down a size or two.

SureFeed Microchip Pet Feeder Connect review: Price and competition

3 / 10

Handy information, but it doesnt come cheap.

The SureFeed Microchip Pet Feeder Connect costs £120 and that doesn’t include the £50 that youll have to part with for the hub you need to feed the data into the app. Yes, it is possible to reuse the hub that works with the Connected Cat Flap (if you have one), but if you have multiple pets in your home then youll need multiple feeders otherwise, the pet whose diet youre trying to control will simply eat the others unprotected food.

Most other app-connected feeders are designed to feed pets when youre not around, rather than just moderating their eating per se. That said, Sure Petcare does have a non-connected version of the Microchip Pet Feeder that sells for £100; it can usually be found for less. This offers the same functionality, but doesnt track the details of what your pet is eating and when, making spotting long-term issues tougher.

SureFeed Microchip Pet Feeder Connect review: Design

4 / 10

The Pet Feeder Connect doesnt look like any kind of pet bowl youve seen before. It has a thick plastic base that houses the bowls. Beneath these sit two digital scales with magnetic plates on top. You can set this up to be either two bowls (wet and dry food), or a single, larger bowl depending on your pets needs. Covering this is a hinged plastic top that folds in two as it slowly retracts.

What really make this feeder stand out is the curved rectangular opening positioned in front of the bowl. This is the important bit, as it has four scanners embedded within. When it detects a registered pets microchip, the doors will slide open. If your names not down, youre not coming in.

Its a pretty solid design, let down by a couple of minor issues. First, the buttons sit around the back of the device, which means youll have to pull the unit out to see what youre pressing. To be fair, most (Add Cat, Training Mode, Settings) will need to be set only once, with the main one for opening and closing the lid pretty hard to miss.

6 / 10

The second issue is that cats are messy eaters. This will result in things becoming mucky fast, with wet food sticking to the sides of the unit, and dry food tending to slip down the sides of the bowl.

As such, the feeder is likely to require regular cleaning. It isnt waterproof on account of the battery compartments and sensitive microchip readers although, to be fair, Sure Petcare has gone out of its way to make this as painless as possible. Theres a washable rubber inlay for the section where pets place their paws, and the bottom opens up to easily release all the dropped biscuits. The bowls can all be removed, given the unit itself cant be put under running water. In other words, general cleaning will involve a lot of wiping with a non-abrasive damp cloth, and no components are dishwasher safe.

Note that, like the SureFlap Connect, the Microchip Pet Feeder Connect is powered by four C batteries. These arent cheap it cost me just under £10 for batteries from my local Asda.

8 / 10

As such, you may want to invest in rechargeables, although the batteries havent come close to running out after the first couple of months of use.

Its a pity there isnt an option to plug the feeder into the mains but I guess there would be a risk that an enthusiastic kitty would pull the unit out of the wall.

SureFeed Microchip Pet Feeder Connect review: Performance

9 / 10

So, this isnt a normal pet bowl then, and that means your cats will be rightly suspicious of it. Fortunately, Sure Petcare has a training system in place to gently get your cats used to the idea that the lid of the unit opens when they put their fizzog in range.

Before you get to that point, though, youll need to register your pets microchip. This involves pressing the Add Animal button and then coaxing your pet to put its head through.

That done, its training time. There are four buttons on the rear of the feeder, and one of these shows a cat in a mortarboard, perhaps overestimating their intelligence of my particular subjects.

10 / 10

The training is set up in four stages to get your pets used to the sudden motion and (reasonably quiet) noise of the motor, starting with the lid almost completely open and ending with it completely closed.

Theres no time-limit to this; you just graduate your pet to the next stage when its ready with a press of the button. The app also features a setting whereby you can set the speed at which the cover slides, speeding it up or slowing it down as you deem appropropriate, meaning your pets should eventually grow accustomed to how it all works.

My cats took about a month to become comfortable with the feeder. One of the cats was particularly spooked by the sound of the motor and wouldnt go near it for a couple of days; but with a bit of patience, you should be fine. Heres a video of the early stages:

Once all is running, the Microchip Pet Feeder is brilliant. You set the weight of food you need for each bowl in the app, and the lights beneath each one will fill up as you top it up with food, turning red if you go over the limit. As the scales get lighter, the feeder can determine how much food your pet has eaten and will update you with notifications as seen below:

These can get a little much (especially since the updates can come as frequently as 2g instalments). Theyre easy to turn off, though, if you prefer to check in on the app at your own convenience. This is the same app as used by Sure Petcares pet flaps, so youll begin to get a holistic view of your pets life:

There maybe those of you who regard the SureFeed feeder as overkill, but its good if you have your pet on a calorie-controlled diet, or want to show your vet how your pets have been eating recently, given that meal-time enthusiasm is a good proxy for general health. You can see the times of day that they tend to graze:

Surefeed Microchip Pet Feeder Connect review: Verdict

In short, the SureFeed Microchip Pet Feeder Connect does exactly what it promises. Its an easy way to keep an eye on your pets diets, ensure they dont steal each others food, and provides a means by which you can control portion sizes.

It isnt cheap and thats a problem that increases exponentially with the number of pets you have in your home. If you have an obese cat and a skinny one, you cant just buy this for the former, because that pet will just steal the latters food. At £120 per feeder, on top of the cost of the hub (£50) and occasional C battery replacements, the cost could quickly mount.

Ultimately, though, you get what you pay for, and the SureFeed Microchip Pet Feeder Connect is superbly designed. While it isnt exactly a must-have, you may well end up wondering how you got by without it.

Written by

Alan Martin

Alan Martin is a freelance writer with more than a decade’s worth of experience, mainly in the technology space, with bylines at The Evening Standard, Tom's Guide, The i and many others. His main focus at Expert Reviews is ensuring that your next pick of phone or wearable is the right choice for you and represents the best possible value for money. In the past he’s covered a broad range of games, dental apparel and pet accessories and, on one memorable occasion, had to strip off to retrieve a rogue drone from a lake – such is his dedication to reviews.

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