PETLIBROCat Water Fountain, App Monitoring Pet Fountains for Cats Indoor with Stainless Steel Tray, 2.5L/84oz Dockstream Automatic Water Dispenser for Drinking, 2.4G Wi-Fi Smart Bowl Inside

We have five of these brand, four in place around our house and a fifth to wash and clean for rotation. Even our most picky cat loves these. We have a couple of the battery versions and this one on permanent power. (one of our cats needs it running or he doesn't commit until it times out) Much prefer the notifications from this version - lets us know at a glance when a cat drank, when it needs refilling etc. Get plenty of filters and replace them no less frequently than 10-14 days and you will avoid bacteria etc. We use cat water as well.

I was skeptical at first but me and my cats love their fountain! My suggestions are:1. Use filtered water only (also when soaking/rinsing new filters before use)2. Clean/rinse top lid of fountain each day due to pet hair, dust, bugs, etc. (this also provides daily inspection of filter and remaining water in fountain)3. Clean entire system weekly (I put mine in the dishwasher which saves a lot of time and disinfects every nook and cranny)4. Completely take apart every part of the system before cleaning (see pic)5. Replace filters as often as needed6. Always have an alternate water bowl available in case the power goes out and you don’t have a generator4. Replace water as needed and not just when you clean itWe loved it so much, we also bought the pet feeder which has also been wonderful! Especially the camera and microphone for when we’re away!

PROS:1. Simple, elegant design that doesn't draw attention2. Wifi and app alert you to low water and power/connection issuesCONS:1. Spillage - Major design flaw results in water puddles under the unit (see below)2. Braided USB Cable - Typically considered an indicator of a higher-quality cable, the fabric braiding just soaks up spilled water, becomes stained, and results in the harboring of mold and bacteria.3. Poor Cable Management - The notches cut into the feet of the base station have a hard time retaining the cable, which can cause water level misreadings when loose. PetLibro instructs the user to make sure the cable is installed in these cable management slots.4. Difficult Pump Disassembly for Cleaning - The plastic pieces of the pump assembly fit too tightly together, and make disassembly of the motor difficult for regular cleaning. Extra tools are often required to separate pieces that should easily come apart for regular cleaning. One of the pieces on mine has a crack from the force required to separate the piece from the pump.5. Mold & Bacteria - There are a number of tight "nooks and crannies" where bacteria and mold can grow in the motor housing behind the black mesh filter, as well as the plastic filter tray, that are too small to fit the included cleaning brushes into.6. Main Filter is Probably Useless - There is a silicone pipe that extends from the pump up to the plastic pieces of the bowl. The filters have a hole cut into them for this pipe to pass through. The hole is far too large, meaning debris such as fur, food, and other contaminants can simply drop right into the tank. In addition, the "tabs" on the filters cause additional small gaps for debris to pass through. I say "probably" useless, as whatever media is in the filter might actually do some filtering and/or bacteria reduction, but it's highly unlikely.More Information:This fountain suffers from a major design flaw. The stainless steel bowl is too shallow, and as a result, any animal that laps water near the edge will cause water to overflow the edges and form a puddle between the bowl and base station, as well as on the floor. This is a major flaw for a water fountain. In addition, the base station is NOT submersible, so water ingress through the feet of the unit could permanently damage the unit.I reached out to PetLibro about this flaw. As of May 9, 2025, PetLibro is choosing to ignore the issue, and has not made available a simple plastic shield that would mitigate the overflow. What makes the situation worse is that if you look at PetLibro's newer water fountain offerings, you'll see that these plastic shields are included, which indicates two things: 1) PetLibro is aware of the problem, and 2) PetLibro is choosing to ignore the problem.Additionally, I question the reliability of the water pumps themselves. The water pump that was included with my fountain stopped working after only 3 months of usage. PetLibro indicates they have a 24-Month Warranty on this product, and might have replaced the pump free of charge, but in my case, I needed it working sooner than their Customer Service could get a replacement to me, so I was forced to buy a replacement pump from Amazon.While the unit was disassembled, one of my cats expressed his displeasure with the lack of flowing water by chewing on the neck of the silicone pipe that extends from the pump to the bowl of the fountain, nearly severing the top end from the rest of it. The result of this is that I've been very gingerly cleaning the pipe since then, though it grows closer and closer to coming off completely each time, and I fear it will soon do so.The replacement pipe, according to PetLibro's Customer "Service", is $8. That's on top of the $14 I'm out for replacing the pump, bringing the total for replacement parts to over 25% of the overall cost of the entire product.At less than 2 years of ownership, I'm already over $200 into this thing between the purchase cost, replacement parts, and replacement filters of highly-questionable effectiveness.Overall, I do NOT recommend this product. At this point, now having communicated with PetLibro's Customer Service, I can't recommend buying any product from them. I won't be buying any further products from them once this water fountain and the food dispenser cease to work.I just gave the unit a thorough cleaning a day or two ago. I'll try to remember to get more photos of the things mentioned in this review and update it next time I clean it.

Update 2:Petlibro has fixed several more things and actually offered me a refund for all of the trouble I’ve had. (I bought this basically the day it was released and there were lots of problems - see below.)The first thing you should know is this company has stood by their product. When I report feedback in the app, a real person responds via email and offers real assistance. In many cases they have responded with thoughtful feedback and fixes to the problems I reported.So far all of my problems have been with the app, so fixes haven’t involved the hardware itself.As of now, the app has improved tremendously. Almost all of the features work as expected. The only app bug I have now is that when you are using ounces, the little progress icons that show daily goal completion for the past 7 days are always complete whether the goal was met or not. It works properly if you use milliliters.The remaining moderate to major issue is the accuracy of the volume consumed. (More on that below.)The app, in general, is simple and clean, but offers a lot of information about the status of the device and about your kitty’s visits to get a drink.Some of the notifications are a bit much (pet hasn’t had a drink in 4 hours which is considered “abnormal” - whatever) but the notifications can be individually enabled or disabled, and notifications can be silenced based on time of day.The app will prompt to make sure things are okay if you remove the bowl for cleaning and even offer to reset the cleaning reminder if that’s why you removed it.It will also notify you if it detects that you added water.Of course you get notifications for kitty drink visits if you want those.Reminders about cleaning the fountain and changing the filter are configurable and can be set to a duration that makes sense for your situation.The operating mode of the fountain can be set to continuous or cycling on/off for a configurable time.The only real complaint keeping me from giving 5 stars at this point is that the accuracy of the water consumed is somewhat poor. The fountain is very good at detecting small visits for example even just a tenth of an ounce. I have not caught it reporting false positives nor have I seen it miss an actual drinking session. It's clearly ignoring the slow evaporation of water over time as it should.But: I’ve tested the accuracy a number of times by carefully scooping 1/4 teaspoons of water from the flowing stream into a small bowl on a very accurate digital scale using volumes as small as 20ml to as much as 150ml. In every case the fountain is off by between 12 and 20 percent on the low side - meaning it is consistently under-reporting the amount consumed by a fair amount. (As an aside I am pretty sure my cat thinks I’m crazy for doing this. He is very curious about anything I do with the fountain and sits there “chatting” with me when I take measurements.)I have been very careful to follow the instructions with calibration, and I have even factory reset the fountain to make sure the results are the same. At this point the accuracy seems “fair” - it’s not generating crazy numbers that bear no resemblance to reality - but it’s definitely not precise.If you can live with this (I can) then I definitely recommend this fountain. I am hopeful this is something they will be able to address with a firmware or app update in the future.The Wifi setup was painless and the connection for me has been pretty good. Like almost all IoT devices it is 2.4 ghz only.It requires internet access and a cloud account to work with the app.The Wifi scale base is running on an espressif IoT chipset (you can determine this by the MAC address when it connects to WiFi) which is a powerful and widely used home automation platform for devices like this. It’s possible the fountain will be able to have custom firmware loaded onto it in the future if hobbyists in the IoT community take an interest. That could lead to the ability to run the device without the Petlibro cloud account someday. Because it is a fairly capable network device, I keep it isolated to “internet only” access on my network to be safe.As for the fountain itself, it’s identical to the other Petlibro fountains in this family, and you can read great reviews of the hardware elsewhere. For me, it’s a pretty good fountain. The only nit is that there are some tiny spots inside the pump mechanism that are a bit hard to clean.Update:Petlibro has fixed a few things with the app, and they are responsive to issues, but not enough has been fixed for me to add a star.Here is what has been fixed in the app:-Added ability to see measurements in ounces.-Resolved the "hang" issue that caused the need to force quit the app.-Resolved duplicate entries in the log that caused measures to be *way* off.Here are the current noticeable problems with the app:-The goal history indicator is broken - it always shows 100% achievement for the last week regardless of actual water consumption.-They added a "feature" that notifies you if a pet has not had a drink in 4 hours. Nobody needs this alert - and there is no way to turn it off without also turning off the "pet came for a drink" alerts.-There is no way to clear alert messages without opening them one at a time in the app.-The water level indicator is meaningless and also incorrect. If you fill to the fill line, it does not show full. Also, since this is supposed to be able to measure a few milliliters of water being consumed, is it too much trouble to actually show the remaining water volume? That would be very useful for letting users know how much water to add to top it off. Right now you have to either guess, or open the top and see for yourself.After a bit more time with the fountain, I do think there are a couple things about it that are not as good as the Petkit fountains. Specifically: The filter is less than half the size of the PetKit filter, and whether it's the smaller filter or the larger water tray, or the plastic tank, this fountain needs cleaning more frequently than the PetKit stainless fountains. Also, the intermittent mode of the fountain should be more configurable. Right now you can only pick 5 minute increments for run time or off time. Let us pick 1-minute intervals. If my cat stares at the fountain while it's off, and has to wait 5 minutes before it starts, he's unlikely to get a drink. If it could be set to run for a minute then rest for a minute, that would make it much more likely for him to see it while it's running. Instead, I have to run it continuously which is more wear on the motor and more energy.Original Review:I decided to move from a Petkit wireless fountain (which is fantastic) for the consumption monitoring.The design of the fountain is well refined, better than Petkit in some ways. The (silent) cascading fountain and very visible ripples on the stainless tray are pretty irresistible for my cat. I’ve seen him drinking from it more often so far on the first day than he normally does from the Petkit.The way this is supposed to work is that the base is actually a scale, which measures changes to the weight of the fountain. Water is a known weight per unit, so the scale detects when water is added or removed, giving a measure of how much your kitty has lapped up, as well as how full the fountain is.Theoretically it also knows to ignore very slow changes like evaporation, and only registers changes large enough to be caused by kitty drinking.This is all great in theory, but so far the app is such a basket case it’s impossible to know whether it’s accurately measuring anything.For example, the app frequently just goes into an infinite “working” state when trying to navigate the pages.Also, the app shows the tank is only about 80% full even though it was filled precisely to the “fill” line. (Even after calibration.)The app is also missing a number of features. It only measures in ml - so in the US you’ll have to convert from ounces. There is no maintenance or cleaning mode, so when you want to clean the fountain, the app will send you error notifications and you’ll have them in your log forever. There is no way to choose which notifications you want - so if you want low water and offline notifications, you’ll also get an alert every time kitty takes a drink. They are all on or all off.I get that the product is less than a month old, but at this point it’s no better than a regular wireless fountain due to the app issues.Hopefully Petlibro will address these problems quickly. If not, I’ll send this back and wait for one that actually works from Petkit. I’m sure they are working on one.