Fish Mate P7000 Automatic Pond Fish Feeder – Programmable LCD Timer, Ideal for Pellets & Sticks, Large 6.5 lb Capacity

Works as advertised. Easy to assemble and program. Like most pond owners, we have raccoons to deal with. This feeder is used on a small pond. nAttached is a photo of the Fish Mate, suspended from an inexpensive trellis purchased at Lidl; similar one is available on Amazon. With minor modification, it can be assembled low and wide to span the small pond. Bungee cords are hooked onto the feeder and the unit is suspended by a couple carabiners. No need for a cage or other type of enclosure with this arrangement. One month now, and no problems with raccoons. The anti-heron netting is below the feeder and the food just falls through. Bottom line, the feeder is reliable and a good value.

Works great to feed our fish when we are travelling. Just take care not to put too close to water surface or the food will draw moisture and clog up the spout. Also, it does dispense a lot of product. We succeeded by taping the opening a bit to reduce the spout opening. That helped dispensing less food. The timer worked great

This product did work and fed my fish for 10 days. Definitely needs to be in a waterproof container, otherwise my pond pellets started to show moisture damage and I would think the pond condensation would take out the batteries pretty easily. I think the top lid of the dispenser would need to have a rubber seal and be locking for it to be waterproof. Once I put the dispenser in a 5 gallon bucket like the other reviewers, it was fine. Used an orange 5 gallon bucket, cut a hole on the bottom side. My hole was too big, so sealed it off with duck tape. I had to remove the lid from the dispenser to get it to fit in the bucket, but the bucket had a lid that made it water tight. I have a metal grate over my pond to keep the raccoons out, just placed the bucket with my dispenser on the grate (it's level). Pretty easy to program, hardest part is figuring out how much it dispenses. You can program up to 3 feedings and change how much it dispenses with each feeding. The first one or two feedings when you first set it up - nothing comes out as it is still filling the pellets through the the feeder spout. After that, it starts dispensing. To figure out how much it would dispense, I set mine up inside at first with a bowl underneath the spout. I have four 5 - 10" Koi that eat small pellets and I guessed they would need 2 feedings a day on level 2 of the amount of food. Way too much and I would have killed them had I kept that setting. I ended up settling on 1 feeding at level 1 for the small pellets I feed my fish. Overall, it works and kept my fish alive. Don't guess at the level of food dispensed, set it up first and see how much it dispenses with your size pellets. They need to tweak the lid with a rubber seal to make it waterproof (also battery case), but putting it in a 5 gallon bucket solves that problem.

This product works great, once you figure out a couple of things first. It is pretty easy to put together, and it seems like a good design. You need to follow the directions to program it. First you set the clock, then you go through and set up to three feedings per day, with a specific amount of food for each feeding. You should go through the calibration part of the process to measure how much food is dispensed at a level 10, then adjust up or down for your specific number of fish and size of pond. We have three Koi and have adjusted down from our original estimates because we were finding a lot of uneaten food in the pond. The hardest part for us was positioning the feeder where it could dispense in the pond, and be safe from the raccoons and other animals that sneak into our backyard from the woods behind our fence. Thankfully several folks have shared their solutions on Amazon, and I say "thank you" for sharing your ideas. We liked the bucket idea to protect the feeder from sun, rain, and pests. We found that our cat litter buckets worked perfectly, and it has a handle to hang it by. We just happened to have a pole from an unused bug-zapper that has worked well for us so far. We like this setup so well we may use this full time instead of just when we go on vacation. I would like to find a way to have more flexibility in positioning it over the pond, but that may take a little more work. After using this a while we have discovered that ours isn't lasting quite a week on only 1 feeding per day on the lowest setting. Not sure why, but it may be the raccoons. I have seen them sticking their little paws up the spout I assume to pull out more fish food. We were gone a week and it was empty when we returned. Guess we will need to put it out of reach of the raccoons or find a mesh to put over the spout that will keep their paws out. We still like it, but needs more work.

Packaged well. Easy to assemble. Directions on setup were good just a little bit complicated initially on how to program. Hopper is big takes lots of koi pellets (which feed very good thru the feed tube). Just set this up and initial automatic feeding the next day worked day worked great. Time will tell... Regular 5 gallon bucket will fit over the feeder after cutting out a slot for the feed tube. I think maybe the patio pavers coupled with screwing down the unit on wood planks (only provided 2 screw slots in the front (2 add'l screw slots in the backside of the feeder would have been even nicer) "should" work fine. With the 5 gallon bucket to keep the rain off and the unit screwed down on wood with additional paver weights on the sides.... maybe we have a shot with this thing! As this is temporary, while away, not real concerned about the looks ;-). Just needs to do its job! Bought two of these.... one for a 1,200 gallon pond and another for a 400 gallon pond.... With bucket protecting from varmits...... Worked great for about 2 weeks.... went on vacation and within two days each were visited by raccons.... nozzle was torn off of both feeders causing most all of the food spilling into the ponds..... lost 3 15 year old koi due to food dumps...... NOT recommended now.... tossed out and purchased the Hygger Automatic Pond Fish Feeder.... will see how this one does this summer.... BTW, I knew the nozzles did not connect firmly in either case so used silicon glue to hold.... did not work either....

The design isn’t great. So it took a couple of days for an animal to figure out how to take the top and bottom apart to empty the feeder. I thing but it on a paving stone and used bungee Cords to hold it onto the rock and keep the top on. That worked for a few weeks. The. The animal just pulled off the tube that delivers the food to the water and all the food poured out. I’ve also lost the tube now so the feeder isn’t usable. Maybe I’ll find it when I clean the 7,000 gallon later this summer, but for now it’s useless. All that out of the way, it works pretty well if animals aren’t defeating the design. The timer lets you set up to three feeding times during the day and you can set the amount of food at each feeding. That latter isn’t an exact measurement, so you’ll need to put in your mix of food and do some testing to see how much comes out for each unit of feeding. Then you can assign multiple feeding units per feeding time.

I bought this product about 3 months ago. I too, had trouble with the programming. When I finally got the right person on the phone, the programming was perfect. The problem was: the manual was different from the verbal instructions I received on the phone. Now that that is taken care of, I was reading reviews that mentioned that the unit did not work well in high humidity or rainy days. The food would clog up and the company said it was not waterproof. So I put my talented husband to the task to fix this problem before we even installed it permanently. He used materials he had at home and created a beautiful cover for the unit. Within one week of installing the unit and cover, we had about 4 days of heavy rain with a lot of wind. Nothing clogged up and the unit worked perfectly. Since that time, we have had several high humidity days and also more rainy days. We live in Texas and it can be very hot and dry for several days. No matter what the weather, this unit with the "weatherproof" cover has worked perfectly. I put enough pellets in the feeder for 1 month (this last time for 2 months), and I have not had one single problem yet. The materials he used: A five gallon paint bucket (from any hardware store), a post that was cemented in the ground on the outside of the pond wall, a metal flat holder that previously was used to hold an old satellite dish unit to a roof, and a few screws. He put air holes in the upside down bucket as well as a cut out for the feed spout and screwed it to the holder which was screwed to the post. He then painted the entire bucket, etc. It looks beautiful and can easily be removed to add more feed.

Excellent feeder although as stated on several reviews, it is not critter proof. Most people put a bucket over it with a slot. I chose to disguise it under a home made fishing cabin. Only issue which I resolved, was feeding a small enough amount on “mini” fish pellets. I compressor the feed screw slightly (1/2” overall) to reduce the feed rate in half.