Sure Petcare Felaqua Connect Review

Introduction

Cats can be difficult to monitor, since they tend to hide health problems from their owners. As such, you need to be on the lookout for clues that may help you to determine the state of their health. One factor that could signal an issue is how much a cat drinks per day. Only few owners are aware of how much water their cats consume – which is where the Sure Petcare Felaqua Connect comes in.

By reading your cat’s microchip, this smart water bowl lets you monitor how much your pet is drinking per day, plus the times they drink, so you can spot any changes they could signal your cat requires assessment by a professional vet.

Easy to set up, and providing clean water on demand, the Sure Petcare Felaqua Connect can provide great insight into your cat’s health and wellbeing.

Design and features

• Neat-looking, it provides fresh water on demand
• Tops up automatically from the reservoir
• Works with the same hub as the other Sure products
• Monitors how much water each cat drinks

Cats like access to fresh water, so the Sure Petcare Felaqua Connect has been designed to provide it automatically. Slightly wider and deeper than a regular bowl (266 x 283 x 283mm), the Felaqua has a raised platform that accepts a small saucer.

On top, there’s a removable 1-litre reservoir with a screw lid. When you place this top-down on the feeder, it opens the valve and fills the bowl. As your cat drinks, the saucer tops up automatically, delivering fresh water.

This reservoir locks securely into place, although if you have quite a naughty cat (as I have), then it can be knocked over.

There’s a slight gurgling sound as the saucer fills up, but my three cats found it more interesting than scary, and started to drink from it immediately.

As with Sure Petcare’s other products, the SureFlap Microchip Pet Door Connect and Microchip Pet Feeder Connect, the Felaqua is a smart product that connects through Petcare’s hub, a cute cat-shaped device that plugs into your router via Ethernet.

You can share the same hub for up to 10 devices, so you can cope with a busy household of pets, even if you have multiple feeding bowls, water stations and pet flaps. Make sure you buy the right version: the Felaqua is significantly cheaper if you buy it without the hub.

You need to insert four D batteries (not provided) into the Felaqua, then use the app to pair it to your hub. It’s all pretty quick; I had the system set up pretty quickly.

If you already have another Sure product and have scanned your cat’s microchips, you can just add them to the Felaqua. If this is your first device, you have to put it into learning mode, and it will scan your cats as they approach for a drink.

Once working, and your cats assigned, the Felaqua automatically monitors how much each cat drinks, showing you total daily consumption and the average number of visits, as well as a breakdown graph that displays the times and levels that each cat drank.

Tapping a cat displays a graph that indicates roughly how much water is remaining. It isn’t entirely accurate, and you don’t get a notification when the water level is empty or near-empty. However, you can choose to receive notifications when a pet drinks and when the water has been topped up.

Notifications about a cat drinking aren’t particularly useful in most cases; however, if you have a sick cat and want to know if it’s taking water again, it can be a useful tool, so I recommend toggling the option on in those instances.

Performance

• Largely accurate, but some customisable notifications would be good
• Accurately measures visits to the water bowl
• Insights from the data are largely manual
• A useful tool to monitor your cat’s health

With its microchip reader around the door, the Sure Petcare Felaqua Connect is largely very accurate, detecting my three cats the majority of times. There were a few instances when the water bowl would just say something like ‘4ml of water has been removed’, since it hadn’t correctly identified a cat.

Seeing how much each cat drinks per day is handy. If a cat stops drinking or starts increasing how much it drinks, then it’s a sign that there’s an underlying health problem that you may want to get investigated.

There isn’t much insight in the app. For example, it would have been useful to have a learning period where the system works out how many times your cat visits the water bowl and how much it drinks, then it could send automatic warnings if your cat stops drinking or takes on a lot more water.

As it stands, the system is still useful, but you do need to stay on top of the data, and you need to account manually for some changes. For example, if you give your cat dried food on one day, it’s only natural that it will need to drink more water; cats that eat wet food typically drink a lot less. Also, if it’s been raining recently, it may just be that your cat has decided to drink out of a puddle, resulting in fewer visits to the water bowl.

Still, the Felaqua provides a means by which you can gauge how much water your cat is consuming. By keeping an eye on the information, you have a great resource that will indicate behaviour that’s out of the ordinary, enabling you to seek help early. And for pets that you know are sick already, it’s a useful tool that can give a vet important information.

Conclusion

Cats drink a lot less fluid than dogs, so it can be difficult to monitor their water consumption, particularly in multi-pet households. The Sure Petcare Felaqua Connect is a great tool for keeping an eye on your pet’s drinking patterns, so you can spot potentially dangerous changes and seek help if needed.

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