Best food for auto feeders

[pcc]

Hi, I recently purchase two aquarium co-op auto feeders for a month long trip that will be occurring in the near future. I am looking for food recommendations to run in the feeders.   I have two community tanks. the first tank (37  gallon) has Honey Gourami, Cherry Barbs, Neon Tetra, Cory's, Kuhli loaches, Otocinclus and a pair of Fire red Apistogramma.  The second tank (29 Gallon) has 3 Bolivian Rams, Rummy Nose Tetra, Otocinclus and Dwarf Chain loach.

Do you mix food types in the feeder or does it run better with just one type of food? Do flakes work or do you have to crush them up to a consistent size?  Has anyone tried mixing pellet sizes in the auto feeders?

Thanks for the advice.

 

[CJs Aquatics]

Haven’t used mine in a while but had success with many different things mostly different pellet sizes. Xtreme big fella pellets, as well as their nano pellet, and some dr bassleer pellets mixed predominately although flakes can be used also. The coop just released a video on YouTube I believe it was called the perfect cut that shows them using a piece of white paper underneath the feeder to determine the spread pattern. I believe this would be beneficial for you to try to try some different things and see what works best for your specific tank, I think most things will work but how effectively is probably situational with regards to food choice. I’ll try to link the video below for your viewing, hopefully this helps in some regard…

 

[pcc]

Thanks!

[Odd Duck]

Pelleted foods definitely feed more reliably than flakes or irregularly shaped foods.  You can mix different size pellets to some degree but they dispense more evenly if they are at least similar size - like a mix of 1 mm to 3 mm, or 2 mm to 4 mm, or 4 mm up to 6 mm mix.  You can very easily mix several different types of pellets like some sinking, some floating, veggie, meaty, etc.  The dispenser doesn’t care about that, just the size and shape.  I never tried big differences in size of pellets since I was using them on medium to slightly larger grow out tanks (29 gallon up to 55 gallon) for Jack Dempsey cichlids that were fairly sorted out by size, so the smaller fry got smaller pellet mix, as they grew they got a bigger pellet mix, etc.

If you decide on trying some flake foods, make sure it’s fairly even in size or you’ll need to crush or chop it up some since big flakes will tend to dispense very unevenly.