Cat vs OrusPro Sunny Bowl: is a smart bowl for kibble really useful?

In Italy there are approximately 65 million pets, of which around ten million are cats and more or less 9 million are dogs (the source of the data is Euromonitor). These are values that put us at the top in Europe, where overall there are around 200 million domestic cats and dogs, and which make the so-called pet care market particularly profitable, with a total turnover of almost 4 billion of euros only in our country.

Perhaps also due to the years of the pandemic, the Italians are more and more likely to have a pet with them (there are now double those who were in 2015), 42% of families have one and there are also more and more who believe that technology can help them in the management and care of their pet: according to a recent Samsung survey, 62% of Italians think sowhile 48% would like to adopt technological solutions to monitor the position and movements of the cat or dog and 38% would do so above all for their safety.

In Italy there are startups like the Turin-based Domethics (which we had seen to CES in Las Vegas) in Romanian Worms which are active precisely in this sector and many technological products dedicated to animal care are now on sale, such as water fountains with motion sensors, self-cleaning litter boxes and smart bowls. It is with these concepts and these numbers in mind that we asked to try the new OrusPro Sunny Bowl WiFi from the Italian OnegearPro, which is precisely a food dispenser programmable and manageable via app. We didn’t focus on the litter, which the company also has in its catalogue, both because it is quite expensive (349 euros, in line with the competition) and because we weren’t sure how it would be received. Pinotto, the cat who helped us in this test.

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How the OrusPro Sunny Bowl WiFi is made

The OrusPro Sunny Bowl WiFi is available in two versions, with single or double bowl (and divider in the middle to avoid the animals fighting), which cost 129 or respectively 149 euro: it is essentially a 35 centimeter high cylinder with a stainless steel upper part inside which the croquettes are placed. Which are then dispensed through the bottom part.

The distributor arrives at home disassembled, but assembly is simple: join the two halves, place the bowls and the divider (if you have chosen a double one), add the food and you can start. By downloading an app, obviously: it’s called Tuya Smart, it’s used to manage various devices related to home automation, we didn’t know it but we found it well done. Minimal, but well done. From the app you pair the OrusPro Sunny Bowl WiFi with your smartphone connect to your home wireless network, you can eventually rename it (but the initial icon remains that of a dog, even if you have a cat) and then you can basically do two things: dispense food, even remotely and therefore even when you are away from home; program a series of meals (up to 20) at specific times of the day, also establishing how much food will end up in the bowls.

The OrusPro Sunny Bowl WiFi in everyday life

For our test we chose the version with app because we believe that, if you decide to invest in such a device, it makes sense to do so for a product that can also be managed remotely. Not just a food dispenser at specific times of the day but also an object that can handle any unexpected events and adapt to changing conditions: if (for example) the cat has more or less appetiteperhaps because he has already eaten a portion of treats and wants less kibble.

The OrusPro Sunny Bowl WiFi can do both: through the app you can decide for one food supply extemporaneously, using the dedicated button which will make a number of deliveries related to the corresponding openings of the separator between the upper and lower part of the device. The same unit of measurement is used for establish meals programmed.

We mainly used the second function, setting 4 dispensings within 24 hours, spaced 6 hours apart. With the app everything is extremely easy and Pinotto got used to it quickly, only at the beginning annoyed by the noise that the dispenser makes when it releases the food, but no longer worried about his human’s possible forgetfulness: if you leave the house and only afterwards comes to mind that “I didn’t remember to feed the cat”you can fix it on the fly or even trust that the dispenser will do its duty at the appointed time.

That’s basically it the main advantage of an object like the OrusPro Sunny Bowl WiFi, which is not cheap but frees you from the anxiety of forgetting something in relation to feeding your pet. Even if it happens, it doesn’t matter. Not only that: we noticed how the cat was more regular in his meals and less pretentious in asking for them, as if somehow had gotten used to programmingand in general the bowl area seemed tidier to us, because the distribution of the kibble can be adjusted precisely and there is no risk of exaggerating.

Between the things we appreciated less, the fact that the position of the bowls makes the area at the bottom, directly under the food outlet ducts, difficult for the cat to access (we happened to have to rotate them to help him) and that there is no webcam which would have been useful to keep ‘eye the animal. But who knows if Pinotto would have liked it this invasion of his privacy.