robbieb

I am going on vacation in February and I was wondering if anyone has used automatic feeders with small cichlid pellets? I have 6 -1.5" rb piranha's and they a lot.

I can get my father in law to feed them, but he is not the most reliable person.

Cody

how long will you be gone? it migh not even be nessary to use an automatic feeder

robbieb

I will be gone 7 days.

Cody

ok then you would prouaby want one. im not sure how they would work with cichlid pellets. ive never personaly used them. and with piranhas im sure they woudlnt mind taking out one of there own if they needed to. well as long as you know he can get he can feed them everyother day i think the longest i would go is two days with out feeding them but with the RB P's it could be different.. there are also different kind of feeding blocks that are suposed to be vacation feeders, but i dont know how messy they are and if you have piggy fish they proubably dont last long. maybe if you do some reasearch on the one your looking at it could tell you if it would work

rileyrk190

I had one that i used before. Just be very careful with them and set the hole that allows food to be dumped out to the smallest setting. I have never used them with pellets, but i did use one with fish flakes. Even on the smallest setting it was dumping out too much food. My tank went totally out of whack and fish were dying left and right, and a massive ich outbreak occurred from stress.. Of course this is probably an extreme case, and i was very inexperienced with fish. It may be fine in your case, with a larger tank, which i'm sure you have, and having pirhanas with quite the appetite. i was using it in a ten gallon, and it was way too much food for such a small tank.

COBettaCouple

They could be fine without food for 7 days. Even if you could get them fed once around the middle of the week, that would be good.

Automatic feeders have a tendancy to malfunction.

Trpimp147

sounds like a few people i work with

robbieb

thanks for the insight.