I bought this feeder: http://www.drsfostersmith.com/produ...lpartial&Ntk=All&pc=1&N=0&Ntt=rondomatic&Np=1
It had a fatal flaw. The bracket that attaches to the tank didn't fit any of the standard tank sizes - 20 gal, 55 gal, etc. The part that slips over the tank frame was too narrow and wouldn't fit over the rim of a standard tank. I guess if you had a rimless tank like the ones sold by glasscages.com, it might work.
Anyway, I had a chance to study it's other features. In some respects it's pretty nice. The dumping mechanism is neat and crisp and having a lot of little dumping bins is pretty good for portion control. The main drawbacks I saw were as follows:
1. Fast dumping. The bins should dump slowly over a period of minutes so the fish could take in the food before it sinks. Instead they dump instantaneously so all the food in a bin goes into the tank at one time.
2. Unnecessarily limited feed times. The feeder has 28 separate dumping bins, but only 4 pins to trigger the dumps. The pins are like the analog timers you buy at HD where you put in a pin where you want to trigger an on/off switch. The good ones have a settable pin for every 15 minutes in a 24h period. This feeder should be like that, but instead has only 4 pins for 24h.
It had a fatal flaw. The bracket that attaches to the tank didn't fit any of the standard tank sizes - 20 gal, 55 gal, etc. The part that slips over the tank frame was too narrow and wouldn't fit over the rim of a standard tank. I guess if you had a rimless tank like the ones sold by glasscages.com, it might work.
Anyway, I had a chance to study it's other features. In some respects it's pretty nice. The dumping mechanism is neat and crisp and having a lot of little dumping bins is pretty good for portion control. The main drawbacks I saw were as follows:
1. Fast dumping. The bins should dump slowly over a period of minutes so the fish could take in the food before it sinks. Instead they dump instantaneously so all the food in a bin goes into the tank at one time.
2. Unnecessarily limited feed times. The feeder has 28 separate dumping bins, but only 4 pins to trigger the dumps. The pins are like the analog timers you buy at HD where you put in a pin where you want to trigger an on/off switch. The good ones have a settable pin for every 15 minutes in a 24h period. This feeder should be like that, but instead has only 4 pins for 24h.
