The station
When filters are on subscription
Reviews
We have not shipped to a single customer, so there is nothing here to show you. When there is, it goes in this space — including the reviews from people whose cats walked past it, because a page that only prints the good ones tells you nothing you can use.
We do not buy reviews, seed them, or write them ourselves.
What you’re actually buying
Not a health intervention. A better-run piece of kitchen equipment, in the place the guidelines say it should be.
304 stainless. It doesn’t scratch the way plastic does, it takes boiling water without complaining, and it will outlive the cat. We’re not going to tell you steel is more hygienic than plastic — the best study on that found the opposite, and we’d rather say so.
Durability, honestly framedThe deck lifts off and the pump lifts out, in about four seconds, with nothing to unscrew. Most fountains fail because cleaning them is annoying enough that people stop — so what matters is not how well it cleans but how little you have to want to.
Rinses clean
A window down the front face shows the water level, so you can tell at a glance whether it needs topping up without lifting the deck off. Small thing. It is the difference between checking it and meaning to check it — and a fountain run dry is a pump killed.
On the front faceThe part that actually breaks
You can see the industry admitting it in what they sell alongside. One major brand lists replacement pumps at $9.99–12.99. Another markets a product called, in its own words, “Free Water Pump Replacements For Life”. Nobody creates that listing unless they expect pumps to fail.
Ours is warranted for five years. If it stops moving water in that time we send a whole new station — not a pump in a jiffy bag with a video-evidence form to fill in. We would rather absorb that than sell you a subscription to your own fountain breaking.
About filter plans
They are about billing. “A subscription payment which I did not authorise.” “They charged my card $55 a month.” “I have tried cancelling and continue receiving shipments.” “Why have I received an email saying filters are being shipped? I have no fountain!” Two of the three biggest brands in this category sit at 29% and 41% one-star on Trustpilot, mostly for this.
Where to put it
The AAFP/ISFM feline environmental needs guidelines state plainly that “food and water resources should be separated from each other”, and that a cat should have a choice of at least two of each key resource. Most homes do the opposite and put the water beside the food.
Two stations, two rooms — which is what the guidance actually asks for.
Day 7, unwashed
Filtered & circulated
Staged comparison, not a controlled experiment. What it represents — that a standing bowl accumulates over a week, and that only about one owner in five washes it daily — is from Raspa et al., BMC Veterinary Research 2023.
Why the subscription exists
This is the one piece of the product that genuinely has to happen on a schedule — and the reason is more interesting than “it gets clogged”.
Activated carbon reduces chlorine, taste and odour — that’s what it’s for, and it’s the basis of the NSF/ANSI 42 standard. But carbon does not remove bacteria. And by stripping out the residual chlorine, it removes the very thing that was suppressing bacterial growth downstream of it.
The result is that the filter medium itself becomes the most hospitable surface in the system. Peer-reviewed work on point-of-use carbon blocks describes exactly this colonisation.
Source: Environmental Science: Water Research & Technology, Royal Society of Chemistry.
Fourteen days per filter. Eight filters per box. One delivery every sixteen weeks — which lands before you run out, not after. Or take a year in one box and skip the rhythm entirely.
Questions
Honestly: we can’t promise that, and anyone who does is going beyond the evidence. What’s established is that dry-fed cats carry a real hydration gap, that more dilute urine measurably lowers calcium oxalate stone risk, and that a standing bowl next to the food bowl is the worst version of a water station. This is a well-made, well-maintained, correctly-placed water source. That’s the claim.
It is optional — you can buy once and reorder manually whenever you like. We default to the subscription because a carbon filter left in past its interval is genuinely worse than a clean bowl, and defaults are the only thing that reliably beats good intentions. Skip, pause and cancel are all two clicks in your account.
Fair question, and it’s the right one to ask a company that sells filters. Fourteen days is our own recommendation for a warm, open, protein-contaminated system, and we’ll be straight with you: there is no published pet-specific study validating any particular interval. Household water filters run six to twelve months in a sealed, cold, chlorinated line — a cat fountain is none of those things. If you’d rather run three weeks and wash the basin more often, stretch the cadence to twenty weeks and you’ll pay us less.
You’re right that they do — it is the single most common complaint in this category, and most units give up somewhere between two and six months. Ours carries a five-year warranty on the pump, and if it stops moving water we ship a whole replacement station rather than asking you to film the fault and post a part back. We would rather carry that cost than pretend the problem doesn’t exist.
No, and we understand why you’re asking — the one-star reviews for the biggest brands in this category are mostly people who couldn’t cancel or were billed for filters they never ordered. The plan is opt-in, we email three days before every shipment so you can skip it, it doesn’t start until the fountain has actually arrived, and cancelling takes two clicks in your account with no retention flow in the way.
Probably not, and we’re not going to pretend otherwise. The best peer-reviewed study on pet bowls found metal carried higher bacterial counts than plastic. We use steel because it doesn’t scratch, doesn’t hold odour, takes boiling water indefinitely and looks like an object rather than a toy. Hygiene comes from how often it’s cleaned, not what it’s made of.
It doesn’t appear to be a real phenomenon. The only study that tested it found no effect on any measured outcome, and it isn’t mentioned anywhere in the AAFP/ISFM feline environmental guidelines. Plenty of brands sell against it. We’d rather not.
We ship to the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and the unit is supplied with the correct plug and voltage for the market you order from — select yours at the top of the page. Filter subscriptions ship free in all five.
We have not measured it yet, so we are not going to print a number. Every brand in this category publishes one; almost none of them say at what water level, from how far away, or against what background — and several publish two different figures on the same site. You will hear moving water if the room is silent. When we have measured it properly, full and nearly empty, we will publish the method next to the number.
Nights
The offer
The research is clear that some cats want moving water and some don’t, and that nobody can tell you in advance which one is asleep on your sofa. Charging you to find out would be a strange way to run a business.
Use it for ninety nights. If it isn’t being used, email us one line and we refund the whole order — fountain, filters, delivery. Don’t send it back. Give it to someone whose cat might feel differently.