(Keeping It Pawsome received a complimentary WOpet Boost Automatic Feeder to review.)

Bottom Line

Tired of having to fill up your dog or cat’s food bowl every few hours?

I know I find it tedious. And, when I don’t get to it soon enough, one of our cats is always ready with a reminder. Often, at an inopportune time. Like when I’m on a Zoom call. Or at 3 in the morning.

The WOpet Boost Automatic Feeder provides automatic feedings up to four times a day so your pets never have to go five minutes without food again. Unless you have six cats like we do. Or, perhaps, a 125-pound dog – the feeder is recommended for small- to medium-sized dogs and cats).

In our case, we’re using the WOpet Feeder to supplement our feedings throughout the day. It’s been a great addition to our food routine.

And despite some issues getting the timing of the feedings right, we’d recommend it to anyone with one or two cats or small- to medium-sized dogs.

Just the Facts

The seven-liter WOpet Boost Automatic Feeder provides up to four feedings per day. Each meal can contain up to nine portions. And each portion is roughly 10 grams.

The feeder works with dry food only. Pellets must be 0.2 to 0.6-inches in diameter, which most cat food is. The feeder does have an anti-blocking design so food doesn’t get stuck. But it won’t work if the pellets are too large.  

Feeding times are customizable. As are how many portions you want delivered.

Additionally, the feeder has a recording device and speaker so you can record a 10-second message to play before the food is released. Ours is my voice saying “Come and get it!”

The WOpet Boost Automatic Feeder must be plugged in to work. It does have a battery backup system (batteries not included) in case you lose electricity. But it won’t last for long.

How We Use It

As mentioned above, we have six cats (though one doesn’t eat dry food). With five cats used to browsing dry food throughout the day, we’re constantly pouring food into bowls. It gets monotonous. And kind of like the definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over again.

So, when WOpet asked if we’d like to review one of their Boost Automatic Feeders, we thought it sounded like a great sanity-saving addition to our household.

And it has been.

Though we find we still have to pour food in a few times a day, it’s nowhere near as often as before.

Our feeder is set to deliver food at 12:15 a.m., 9:30 a.m., 1:30 p.m., and 7:45 p.m. Each feeding delivers four portions, except the midnight one, which does five.

The first time the recording of my voice played, several of our cats looked up to see what the strange new sound was. When the feeder began releasing food, our fat Monkey ran to the bowl – she knows what the sound of food hitting a bowl sounds like!

They all now know that my voice coming from the strange white contraption in the kitchen means food is imminent.

Pros

The WOpet Boost Automatic Feeder is easy to put together. You basically just have to attach the power cord, feeding bowl and the lid and you’re good to go. Each step is clearly explained in the instruction manual and the steps are easy to follow.

Food is delivered promptly on time and your cat will likely quickly associate the sound of your voice (or the sound of the food being released) with fresh food.

For our cats, each feeding lasts about a couple of hours. I could probably increase the portions at each feeding to maybe last longer, but, as you’ll see below, I don’t want to do that.

One more nice thing about WOpet: if you buy directly from the company 50 cents of every purchase goes to support the cause of your choice. (There’s a cool look-up option so you can find almost any charity in the U.S.)

Cons

First and foremost, we wish we could program the feeder for more than four meals. Because we have a couple of cats that like to eat until they throw up, we’ve always kept the food in their bowls low and fed throughout the day.

Rather than having the option to feed more portions at each meal, we’d rather be able to do more feedings. (WOpet does offer other feeders with more meal times.)

With that said, using the feeder has allowed us to cut down on how often we have to put out food manually. But more feeding options could eliminate that need for good.

Another feature that would be helpful would be some type of indicator that the food barrel is empty. I’m pretty sure that each time we’ve realized it was empty, it was after several feedings had been missed.

Finally, the set-up process for feeding times isn’t intuitive. And, for anyone who struggles with stuff like that it might be frustrating.

There’s a lot of pushing and holding down buttons and switching between buttons. And, sometimes when to press “set” versus when to press one of the other buttons isn’t always clear. It took us some fiddling to figure out and even then, we didn’t get it ALL right.

You see, it’s critically important to remember that the WOpet feeder operates on military time. But that’s not stated anywhere in the instruction booklet, and a quick look at the reviews (on the WOpet site or Amazon) indicates several people have struggled with this.

We did eventually figure this out when we noticed there was no way to indicate a.m. or p.m.

But what we didn’t realize was that we hadn’t set up the current time properly. So, for a couple of weeks the feeder delivered meals at the opposite time than we had intended.

If the feeder was set for 02:00, it delivered food at 2 p.m. If it was set for 17:45, it released food at 5:45 a.m. It took reaching out to WOpet and them taking the issue to their engineers that we finally figured out it was the original time setting that was throwing everything off.

More of an annoyance than anything else (at least for us), this could have been avoided if the instruction manual stated that all times needed to be set in military time.

Cost and Where You Can Buy It

The WOpet Boost Automatic Feeder costs $49.99 (with free shipping) if you buy it directly from WOpet or $59.99 if you buy it from Amazon. (Keeping It Pawsome is an Amazon affiliate and will receive a small commission if you make a purchase.)

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