Eheim 3581 "Feed-Air" Digital Automatic Aquarium Feeder - DANGER

This post is a little bit off topic for this blog, but it contains important safety information about a dangerous failure condition that I feel should be shared.

First I'll mention that I attempted to contact the manufacturer, but their contact forms on their web site are broken. Nice one, guys.

I've had my Eheim feeder for quite some time (December 2006) and have been very happy with it. I use it 100% of the time for flake feeding to ensure regular, uniform feedings. It has been a successful strategy until recently.

I arrived home to find the unit spinning.. and spinning. Constantly feeding. If it started at its normal time, then it had been giving repeated feedings approximately every 10 seconds for almost an hour. My fish are overfed, but fortunately there was not that much food left in the hopper.

It is likely to be a low/dead battery scenario (its still running strong and shows no signs of stopping. the time is stuck at the feeding time of 15:00, and the buttons on the unit are unresponsive), or what the failure is but it was completely out of the blue. If i was actually out of town and the thing was full of food, it would have killed all my fish. There was no low battery indication on the display, and the unit claims to have a low battery indicator.

My advice? Replace the batteries regularly. My batteries had been in there a long time, perhaps a year. The unit was working and there was no low battery indicator, so I figured it was okay. The only hint that I had of low battery was this event, so again, if you choose this unit, replace the batteries regularly!

The following has been a public service announcement, we now return to regularly scheduled programming.