|
Have used many of them, including the fancy Eheim electronic one. They all failed at some point, usually either by not feeding at all (Eheim), or dumping all the food at once (most of the battery powered or mechanical ones.) They're not made well enough to use in the moist environments that they're in. The mechanical ones are particularly bad; I used an Eheim effectively for a few years but even it stopped working after awhile. Fish do fine fed once/week, if you're not interested in breeding them. Traveling 3-4 days a week is not problem. When we leave for longer vacations (3+ weeks), I'll 'board' some valuable killies with others, the fact that killies do fine in small, portable containers is handy, but the rest of the fish don't get anything and I rarely lose them. It's *very* hard to starve an adult fish to death. Fry can starve. In my opinion, it's better to leave the fish on their own, rather than mess with auto feeders, which would mean you'd still need water changes, or someone to 'fish sit', that usually doesn't work out unless the sitter is a skilled aquarist. YMMV. But, I'd advise against the auto feeders for vacation backup. The place they *do* have a use, is for high metabolism, active fish that you are growing out and want to keep well fed. Show quality guppies are one of these; they need 4-5x/day feedings to grow quickly to show size and be able to tote those big tails around. Big spawns of the kinds of fish that Jen showed in the talk is another, when you have 150-200 N. pulcher fry in a too small tank, they really need 3-4x/day feeding + frequent water changes. Some killies, esp. Lamprichthys tanganicanus, really seem to appreciate multiple times/day feeding when growing to adulthood . In both these cases, I found the Eheim feeder to be 'o.k.' though I always had to pay attention to it, make sure it hadn't clogged, stopped working, etc. Matt Your E-mail and More On-the-Go. Get Windows Live Hotmail Free. Sign up now. |
_______________________________________________ GSAS-Member mailing list GSAS-Member@thekrib.com http://lists.thekrib.com/mailman/listinfo/gsas-member