Automatic Food Feeder?

[ijankrom]

Will be on a week long vacation for Christmas. I have a automatic food feeder I picked up from Wal-mart. It works as it's suppose to. Only problem I believe it's dumping too much food into the tank. It does have adjusting lever, but at the lowest it's still too much IMO. Any recommendations from those who have used these on how to adjust any further so I'm not polluting my tank before I get back?

My initial thought was pushing a piece of foam up that tube to narrow it even further. Leaving on the 21st, so I have just over a week to come up with something.

[imma24]

Is there any way you can portion out food and have someone come to your house to feed every other day?

[korith]

Hmm an autofeeder from walmart. Does it by any chance look like this ?
Penn plax daily double feeder, drops food every 12 hours. I have 2 that I had to modify so they would drop less food. Open up the feeder and take a look at the orange scoop, take a piece of paper and tape it partly over the opening. Can limit how much food goes through this way. Hope that made sense, if not I can post a picture in a few hours.

[mizzoutank]

too little is better than too much in this situation.

if it doesn't do enough-at least your fish get some food to tide them over, rather than over feeding-which can cause a plethora of other issues.

honestly, if you did a daily feeding of too little-the fish still get enough food to tide them over. i've gone 4 days without feeding and the fish were perfectly fine.

[ijankrom]

Is there any way you can portion out food and have someone come to your house to feed every other day?

Everyone I trust alone in my house will be gone that week too.

@korith - that's it exactly. Paper around the orange scooping tube thing, excellent.

@mizzoutank - My concern is the exact opposite of what you're thinking. Too much food is being dispensed from the automatic food feeder. I usually get those dissolving things that releases food overtime. I bought the automatic feeder several years ago when I went on a 2.5 week vacation knowing those dissolving things wouldn't hold for that long. Instead of spending more money, I'll just replace the batteries in this automatic feeder and adjust the orange part like korith suggested, unless someone else comes up with something even better.

[mizzoutank]

good gravy i cannot read today. lol

in that case of reading your post correctly. I agree with Korith. lol

or play around with getting the feeder thing to dump part into the tank, part outside and have a cup/bowl/plate etc catch the rest

[ijankrom]

getting the feeder thing to dump part into the tank, part outside

Funny you should mention this. Noticed when I first used, after coming back from vacation, the rather large area on either side of the hole on tank top that food had collected. I hadn't taken into count that food starts to drop once there's enough of a slope. Did not even realize how much collected until, stupid me, blew the excess into the tank. No worries, I decided not to feed them again for several days after that.

[Trillianne]

For a week or less... unless you have fry or some very touchy fish just don't bother feeding at all imo.

Which if you have just the black skirts listed in your sig I'd think they be fine. Keep in mind that in the wild fish do not eat every single day.

If you have someone coming over even just once or twice then measure out a feeding quantity for them and that is even better.