The 7 Best Automatic Pet Feeders in Australia

A 4 kg cat eats about 50 to 70 g of dry food a day, and dry food weighs about 0.4 to 0.5 g per millilitre, so a 2 litre hopper is roughly a fortnight and a 5 litre hopper three weeks or more. Buy the smaller one unless you have two cats: kibble left in a hopper for a month goes stale and soft in humid weather. Check the portion step too, because 10 g increments are coarse against a 50 g day.

Yes, if you size for it. A 30 kg labrador eats about 350 g a day, so an 8 litre hopper holding about 3.5 kg lasts ten days, while a 4 litre cat feeder is empty in five. Look for a feeder that allows up to 50 portions a meal so a full ration goes out at once, a rotor rated for kibble up to 15 mm, and a bowl at least 17 cm across. Large-breed kibble above that size belongs in a tray feeder or a gravity hopper.

If both cats eat the same food, a splitter feeder with two bowls set apart serves the same portion to each at the same time, and the distance between the bowls does most of the work. If one cat is on a prescription diet or needs its weight held down, a splitter will not stop the other cat swapping bowls; that household needs one feeder per cat, or a microchip feeder that opens only for the registered cat, which is an access bowl rather than a scheduler.

Only tray feeders do. A hopper feeder's rotor is built for dry kibble and will smear or jam on anything moist. A tray feeder holds two to five covered bowls with ice packs underneath, which keep wet or raw food cool for hours rather than days, so it covers a morning meal served before you wake or a day at work, not a week away. In an Australian summer, freeze the packs overnight and expect the last bowl to dry out by the afternoon.

A mains-only hopper stops and, on some models, forgets its schedule. Most good hoppers take D or AA cells as backup and keep the schedule in memory, so a summer storm outage costs nothing but the batteries. Tray feeders run on batteries only and never notice. A Wi-Fi feeder without power backup will still work when the router comes back, but any meal timed during the outage is missed, so fit backup cells before you go away and check them every few months.

Most feeders only join 2.4 GHz networks, and many NBN routers broadcast both bands under one name, so the phone sits on 5 GHz during setup and the feeder cannot follow. Split the bands in the router settings or give the 2.4 GHz network its own name, stand next to the router for setup, and avoid a guest network. A feeder that supports both bands skips the problem, which is one reason the dual-band picks here rank where they do.

A feeder solves meal timing, not company or emergencies. RSPCA guidance is that a pet left alone still needs someone checking on it daily, for water, a blocked feeder, a knocked-over bowl or illness. A hopper with a fortnight of kibble and a camera makes a long workday and an overnight trip easy; for a week away, book a sitter or a neighbour to look in each day and treat the feeder as their backup, not their replacement.