Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Guinea pigs will eat ALL the vegies!!

Steem, it may have been a touch implicit, but sa aqua did suggest only if beds were raised, and guinea pigs couldn't climb up.
I imagine they'd be proficient climbers though, much like the rats?

lol, I was thinking raised beds to keep them in the beds! sorry about that...

one of my hair-brained ideas was to run quail or something in the beds to eat insects, so maybe I got my neurons crossed

quail huh? my dog'd love them...

You could always list about 10 parts on here....and a couple of us could send them the occasional email saying "I really need part X as a replacement" and "I need to start finding a different company to deal with as you do not help your customers". So when they have a load of emails the service might become something they would want to do
Cheers,
KarelM

Hum, could try but they don't list any of those internal parts with part numbers so one would just have to try and describe the particular parts they are interested in.

There is a little electric motor in there that one could probably ask for.

There is of course the auger which is the part I need a two replacements for.

There is the agitator arm and floppy thingy (though this would be much easier to improvise on one's own rather than replace.)

Then there is a safety switch but I've never opened up that part of the feeder to see what replacing that would entail.

perhaps one might wish to replace the power cord

There is the metal part that supports the agitator arm, protects the motor from the feed and is a tube for the auger.

There are two couplings that attach the auger to the drive or the agitator to the drive using pins.

There are pins

There are screws

The rest of the thing is plastic

The company
http://www.autopetfeeder.com/

Anyone want to help? I don't think it is a big company and therefore it would probably be difficult to trick them that the requests for the internal parts are legit. Apparently the same guy who spoke to me on the phone is the one who answered my e-mail and both times the answer was internal parts not available, you must get the entire base unit.

TCL... is there perhaps a grain/feed stock mill or machinery supplier that might have something similar to fit... even if it needs to be cut down...

Or a farm machinery shop that could perhaps make something up to fit.... probably need to be stainless steel... but it would last....

I've done a little searching to see but so far I've only found sites that might be willing to tool up to make such things if I were ordering a thousand or so.

I haven't been able to find out the size of any augers meant for other equipment so far to even guess if they would fit.

I've had problems with little field mice getting into the garage and leaving little surprises everywhere. We bought this elaborate mouse trap but they're smart and avoid it now. We've tried quite a few things to no avail. I'm gonna try and get a couple of plastic toy snakes, my grandfather used them to get rid of birds perching on the window sill.

Another thing that I'm going to try is dried snake droppings. I read about it in a cleaning book...they're odorless & scare rodents off. Might be able to get them at a reptile/pet shop. Pumpkin seeds are good for mice bait too.

Seems I have rid myself of rodents ,I kept finding them in the sump stuck to the pump grate but no longer any sign of them.

Well, a while back the rat trap went missing. I had placed it next to the fish feeder and baited it with peanut butter and some fish food pellets. The peanut butter vanished pretty quickly because the ants carry that off but the fish food pellets are usually too big for them to take quickly out of a little cup. Well, I came out one morning and the trap is gone. Looked around for it thinking that the rat got snapped but not bad enough to kill it right off so had dragged itself away with the trap. Couldn't find the trap anywhere. I do hope that the rat got snapped in it and some other critter came and carried rat and trap away for a easy snack. The other option is that some larger critter got snapped in it and I really don't want to be thinking of a cat or raccoon with a broken foot. I have not seen signs of a raccoon around since I installed the feeders as they are now and the cat that patrols our yard is still just fine so hopefully he carried the rat away for me.

Now we used to have a couple of black snakes hanging around the place. I would probably be ok if they took up residence in the greenhouse to keep rodents at bay but they didn't really look big enough to take on that rat though. I suspect those snakes mostly eat little lizards.

Be sure to put a wire mesh around it when you get it fixed or replaced. I have to put rodent guards on the bottom of my deer feeders to keep the fuzzy tailed tree rats from eating up the plastic components to get to the feed. is there enough of the original material to use fiber glass? that is something you can get at an auto parts store.

Tie the trap to some thing next time
100lb fishing line maybe... Just a thought as we have too.
I hate buying traps for the rats to let them take them
home to teach the kiddys.

That is probably a good idea

Woo..Hooo
a whole new sport, Rat fishing...

Definately not catch and release