To begin with, the filter is essentially worthless. It has a few small, loosely packed granules of activated charcoal in a big bag made of white fuzzy filter material that doesn’t even reliably collect the algae that inevitably form in the thing. The filters don’t last months, as the instructions claim — more like a week or two until they’re hopelessly contaminated with algae and have to be discarded lest they cause the whole bowl to gunk up.

Oh, did I mention the algae? This thing is just full of nooks and crannies that get splashed with water — but don’t stay wet or have continual flow over them — perfect for breeding the icky green stuff. It’s nearly impossible to clean it well enough to stop the growth once it starts; all you can really do is slow it down enough that — if you’re lucky — it won’t make the water taste bad or (worse) make your pets sick. In fact, we thought we’d sanitized the entire thing using bleach (no easy feat, and *not* something that should be necessary) only to see the algae regrow twice before we figured out that it was even inside the pump, which we had to disassemble into 3 pieces to clean — well, clean, more or less. I’m not going to dump bleach into the pump, it has metal parts.

I pin the blame for this one on the crummy filter, first and foremost, and on the product design that creates dark, damp, hard-to-clean surfaces everywhere. Oh, and did I mention that the filters are hard to find? Big chain pet stores are happy to sell you this water bowl (I assume they make more margin than on the Drinkwell, which was the original product in this category) but can’t be bothered to stock the filters. There are aquarium filters in similar sizes — those would actually even do some good, unlike the Petmate filters — but the cheap pump won’t generate enough pressure to give a decent flow rate through them. Nice.

Don’t make the mistake I did. Buy a Drinkwell, not the house-brand knockoff (this product) even if it’s on sale.
Rating: 1 / 5