Dine a Chook PVC Poultry Feeder

Selling at Ebay for $45.99

These feeders are tiny feeders, less than a gallon for this version. They are basic PVC sewage pipe with a few custom caps for the top and bottom.

There are plenty of negative reviews online as well as quite a few positive reviews, around one third negative to 2/3rds positive. However in this day and age of paid product reviewers that are given cash to purchase products in return for posting glowing reviews it is hard to trust any of the commercial platforms selling the items. Here at Chicken Feeder Reviews we turn down all offers of free products for reviewing them and all offers of link swaps of any sort. We also do not use affiliate links or gain any profit in anyway from the website, it is just a weird hobby.

These feeders are marketed very cleverly as “no waste feeders”, not at all true but they avoided claiming that wild birds or rats cannot eat out of the feeder. Chickens will of course bill and rake feed out of the feeder as they do with the other PVC elbow type feeders.Like other PVC elbow feeders the roosters aren’t going to like the feeders if they have an average size comb and wattles. But at least they don’t have to reach in as far as the bucket feeders.

The Ebay reviews are quite good actually but it is difficult to believe a product that is so similar to other PVC feeders has mostly five star ratings. Indeed there is one three star rating stating that the owner contacted the customer after a negative review was posted, sent a change feedback request, then stopped all communication after the customer had removed the negative feedback.

These PVC pipe feeders are less likely to leak as the bucket and pvc elbow feeders but at less than a gallon of feed for the smaller versions to just under two gallons for the largest version one would be refilling them on a daily basis.

There is one troubling thing about the company that sells these Dine a Chook feeders; their marketing seems to be pretty deceptive in a number of ways including the already mentioned ding from the dissatisfied customer that was talked into dropping his negative review.

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The major red flag from this company is the effort they go to discredit other feeders, especially treadle feeders. In their ads they claim that a one gallon capacity feeder will feed eight chickens for a week, an outlandish number of hens because their feeder is a “no waste feeder”. Which is simply false, laying hens are going to need a quarter pound of feed per day and a gallon of feed is about five pounds or twenty days of feed for one chicken. Eight chickens will need 14 pounds of feed per week, three times the capacity of this feeder.
Worse, on their main web site they have a blog post claiming that no treadle feeders are rodent proof, claiming that rats will gang up on the treadles. While that might be true in many of the guillotine style feeders it isn’t true of all treadle feeders. A proper treadle feeder with a spring loaded door and a skinny treadle step that is pushed back far enough will prevent a dozen rats from cooperating and defeating the treadle. And the blog post referenced “dozens of articles on the internet” claiming rats defeating treadle feeders but didn’t link to a single article. An internet search turned up a couple of Grandpa style feeders that didn’t stop the rats which is indeed a problem but it is by pushing up the lid, not overwhelming the treadle.

Note: we do not use affiliate links on our website, be wary of those sites that do use affiliate links as they are being paid for referrals.

The blog post goes on to claim that all treadle feeders have a problem with feed being raked out and attracting rats without mentioning that having an open PVC pipe full of feed is going to do the same thing. They even accuse the grates of not stopping the feed waste while relying upon a grate in their own product!

The article also claims that all treadle feeders leak, some do, usually the guillotine or grandpa styles, or that wind would blow rain into the open lid while the hens are feeding and again, the same thing is known to happen on the PVC elbow feeders.

Their last complaint is that all treadle feeders have moving parts that wear and break, that might last months or years and need replacement. That can be a true statement but not to the extent that you have to worry about a feeder breaking down. Some of the Chinese feeder bins do have screws that pop loose, so do the other guillotine style feeders and the Feed o Matic is prone to this but our most recommended feeder is the rat proof treadle feeder with the inward swinging door and while we have had to replace a spring a few years after we got it, it has given us zero problems. And even when the spring broke the feeder continued to function. Deceptive marketing like this is a huge red flag to us and is why I created this site after struggling to make sense of the conflicting claims.

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