Figured out intruder mode
So we have a kitten who we feed kitten food, and a 1 year old who eats adult food and is already slightly overweight. We got a single SureFeed microchip feeder to stop the adult from eating the kitten food and gaining more weight. One problem I was having was that even though we got the back cover for the feeder, the adult cat could still eat the kitten food from the front by sticking her neck by and eating alongside the kitten.
My initial thought to fix this was just enabling Intruder mode via setting the switch to setting II and enabling the solid orange custom mode for Intruder Mode. I thought this worked initially but for some reason there would be many times it didn’t activate at all and still let the adult cat eat as much as she wanted of the kitten food.
Apparently these feeders have proximity sensors on the inside that prevent the lid from closing if a cat is within range of those sensors, even if Intruder Mode is activated. I found a post online talking about Forced Lid Closed Mode which basically disables the proximity sensors. This fixed the entire problem. By enabling both of these custom modes, the lid consistently closes every time the adult tries to sneak past and eat the kitten food.
I don’t understand what kind of design flaw this is but it was obviously not thought out, and the documentation about the custom modes is so inaccessible. This documentation should be easily accessible public information on the website or via the instructions sheet that came with the feeder.
The steps I took to activate these modes are:
- Clear all previous custom modes (if any are enabled): Set bottom switch to Setting I, cycle custom modes until you see Flashing Red & Green, press Open button to clear all custom modes.
- Enable Intruder Mode: Set bottom switch to Setting II, cycle custom modes until you see Solid Orange, press Open button to save.
- Enable Forced Lid Closed Mode: Set bottom switch to Setting III, cycle custom modes until you see Solid Green, press Open button to save.
- Set bottom switch back to Setting I to re-enable fast lid closing.