Grandpa's Feeders Automatic Chicken Feeder Review: Rodent-Proof, If You Train Them

The short version

What it gets right:

• Rodent exclusion is the one thing every owner in the reports agree on. A keeper who has had one for a few years credits it with keeping a rat problem from taking hold.
• Galvanized steel body, steel lid, steel treadle plate. Nobody in these threads reports rust, a bent panel or a hinge that gave up.
• A laying hen eats roughly a quarter pound of feed a day, so ten hens empty the 40 lb hopper in about two weeks. Filling it's a job you do twice a month rather than daily.
• Wild birds get nothing out of it. Sparrows and starlings can't lift a treadle lid, and one keeper in the threads bought a treadle feeder for a sparrow problem rather than a rodent one. (That keeper never says which treadle feeder it is, so read that one as the format working and not as this box specifically.)
• Two sizes share the same mechanism, 20 lb and 40 lb, so a four-hen flock doesn't have to house the big one.
• No power, no batteries, no electronics, nothing to program. Every failure mode it has is mechanical and visible when you lift the lid.

What it gets wrong:

• Training is your job and it doesn't always take. The two keepers here who describe the staged routine both ended up with hens that wouldn't use the feeder, and one of them fixed it only by bringing in pullets raised on a treadle. (Neither of them names the brand of feeder they were training on, so both count as evidence about treadle feeders in general rather than about this box.)
• The 40 lb model is 21.75 inches wide and 24.75 inches deep, with a tread plate that sticks out another 9 inches in front of that, which rules it out of a compact run. A keeper with an Omlet Eglu and its attached run went looking for a treadle feeder that would fit, never found one, and gave up on the format. (That published comment names the Roamwild they bought instead and never names the Grandpa's, so treat it as one keeper's search coming up empty rather than as a measurement, and the inches at the top of this bullet are the manufacturer's own.)
• Feed can bridge in the hopper. One owner reports the feed jamming and not filling the lower tray after a stretch of normal use.
• It isn't sealed against everything that walks. A long-term owner opened theirs to about thirty slugs and was working out whether taping around the lid would help.
• A treadle needs weight on it to open, and the 40 lb model wants 900grams/2lb of hen standing on it where the 20 lb model wants 500grams/14oz. Grandpa's says lighter birds can be too light for the large feeder, and that the fix is a small weight on the tread plate.
• Nothing about it stops a raccoon. One keeper running a homemade feeder says he can guarantee a raccoon would work the Grandpa's out, and we think he's probably right.

Which flocks and setups it fits

Buy it for a flock of standard-size hens with a rodent problem you can actually see. Rats moving in the run at dusk, feed going down overnight, droppings in the tray in the morning: that's the situation this feeder exists for, and every owner report we have points the same way. Ten to twenty birds is the right range for the 40 lb model. Orpingtons, Australorps, sex-links, Rhode Island Reds, standard large fowl that weigh four pounds and up and aren't shy about food.

It fits badly in a compact run, and that's worth checking before you order rather than after. One keeper with an Omlet Eglu coop and its attached run went hunting for a treadle feeder with a smaller footprint than the Grandpa's, never found one that fit, and ended up with a hanging rat-proof feeder instead. Give it a flat wall and a level base. It sits on the ground, it wants to sit square, and it wants to be somewhere you walk past rather than in the far corner of the run.

The bantam question has a published answer, and an earlier draft of this review told you to go and ask the manufacturer for it. Grandpa's puts the floor at 500gms/1lb for any bird using any of their feeders. Opening weight is 500grams/14oz on the standard 20 lb feeder and 900grams/2lb on the large 40 lb one. Most bantams clear a pound without trouble. Silkie bantams run around two pounds, which puts them right on the line for the large model, and the company's own answer is to put a small weight on the tread plate and to contact them before ordering a large one for small birds. That makes this a model-choice question for almost everybody who asks it. The exception is the true miniatures. A Serama hen can weigh eight to fourteen ounces, which is under the manufacturer's own floor, and no Grandpa's of either size will open for a bird that light.

Two readers should still spend the money somewhere else. Keepers whose real complaint is scattered feed rather than rodents, because a set of no-waste feed ports fitted to a bucket solves the scatter for a fraction of the money and solves nothing at all about rats. And keepers running three or four hens in a small run, who want the 20 lb model or the 12 lb treadle feeder further down this page.

We would push back on one more group, the keepers buying this to solve a rat infestation. A treadle feeder removes the food. Removing the food stops the population growing and does nothing about the animals already living under the coop, and the one keeper in the threads who got on top of rats did it with a trap, on the advice of a local chicken group, after the feeder search failed. Buy the feeder as feed storage that a rat can't open, and budget separately for the rats themselves.

The specs that matter

Capacity is 40 lb on the model reviewed here and 20 lb on the smaller one, and the two share a mechanism. Construction is galvanized steel throughout, lid and treadle plate included. There's no power supply, no battery and no timer, so nothing on it fails in a cold snap except the feed, which cakes if it gets damp. (We keep writing the name with an apostrophe. The Amazon listing drops it, which is a small thing that made the search harder than it needed to be.)

The numbers keepers ask for are all on the manufacturer's FAQ, which is where we should have looked first. The large feeder measures 16.5 inches high, 21.75 wide and 24.75 deep, and weighs 23 lb empty. The standard is 11.5 by 17 by 20 and weighs 15 lb. The tread plate extends 220mm/9 inches out from the front of the large one and 190mm/8 inches from the standard, and that plate is part of the footprint whether or not the listing counts it. Opening weight is 900grams/2lb on the large and 500grams/14oz on the standard, against an adult rat at roughly 300 grams. (Grandpa's own product page rounds the large to 16 by 22 by 25 inches, which is the kind of half-inch disagreement that matters when you're measuring a gap in an Eglu run, and the figures above are the FAQ's rather than the product page's.)

The treadle is a steel plate in front of the box, linked to the lid. Weight on the plate lifts the lid, and weight off it lets the lid fall. The training routine comes from the manufacturer and the feeder ships with two bolts that limit how far things move: the lid propped fully open for the first week, then lid and treadle free to move a little but still staying open in the second, then normal operation. Two keepers in the threads describe that routine, and it worked for neither of them. One had hens too frightened of the moving lid to go near it, and the other had a batch that flat out refused. The one keeper here whose flock did take to a Grandpa's, GArockcrawler, says only that he followed the directions, so we can't tell you what he did that the other two didn't.

How it keeps the flock safe

The safety case for a treadle feeder is indirect, and most of it is about rats. Rats in a coop take eggs, kill chicks, chew through timber and carry in mites, and an open hopper of layer feed sitting out overnight is the invitation. A lid only a hen can lift takes the feed out of circulation between meals, which removes the reason rats come to the run at all, and it does that without a trap, a poison or a nightly chore for you. One keeper who has had one for a few years puts the absence of rats in their run down to the feeder. Another bought a treadle feeder to deal with sparrows rather than rodents, which is the same lid working against a different animal.

What it doesn't do is keep anything out of your run. One keeper who feeds from a galvanized trash can and PVC elbows says he can guarantee a raccoon would work out the Grandpa's, and he has never owned one, so treat that as an opinion rather than a report. We think he's right anyway. A raccoon has hands and all night. The barrier that stops raccoons is half-inch 19-gauge hardware cloth on the run with a buried or aproned skirt at the base, and no feeder substitutes for it.

The failure mode that worries us is quieter than any of that. If feed bridges in the hopper and stops dropping into the tray, the feeder looks full from a distance and the birds aren't being fed, and the one owner who reports it says it started after a stretch where the feeder had worked fine. The same is true of a flock that hasn't learned the treadle. Both failures look identical from ten feet away. Lift the lid and look into the tray when you walk past, at least until you have watched every bird in the flock work the treadle at least once.

Damp is the other thing to watch. A long-term owner cleaned the feeder out and found about thirty slugs in it two days later, then went back to the threads asking whether gaffer tape around the lid would help. Slugs aren't an emergency and we aren't going to dress them up as one, but they turn up because the feeder is standing somewhere damp and shaded, and feed that stays damp grows mold. Put it on a paver in the driest part of the run and check the tray after a wet week. (Slugs appear in exactly one report, and we have no idea whether that's a regional problem or a coincidence.)

Build quality and living with it

Galvanized steel is most of the build story. Nobody in the threads reports rust, a bent lid, a snapped hinge or a treadle that stopped returning, and the oldest ownership report we found covers a few years with slugs as its only complaint. For an outdoor steel box with one moving part that's a good record, and it's also a thin one, because three owners aren't a durability study and we aren't going to score it as though they are.

The score isn't higher because of the jam. One owner describes feed jamming and not filling the lower tray after a period where it had worked, which is a flow problem rather than a corrosion problem, and a single report can't tell you how often it happens. Feed form probably matters. Crumble tends to bridge more readily than pellets in any hopper, and we don't know which the affected keeper was running.

Living with it is mostly filling it and then forgetting about it. Ten hens go through the 40 lb hopper in roughly two weeks, so it's two fills a month against a daily scoop out of a bag, and the feed stays dry under a steel lid in between. The lid is loud, which matters more than it sounds like it should. A keeper training a nervous flock had birds that wouldn't go near the feeder because of the movement and the noise, and was about to put down a patch of old carpet to deaden it.

Feed waste is the claim we would treat most carefully. The listing sells it as a no-waste feeder, and one owner who believes it keeps mice out says in the same breath that the hens still scatter a lot of feed. A treadle lid controls who gets to the tray. It doesn't control what a hen does with her beak once she's standing there, and a bird that flicks feed out of an open tray will keep flicking it. If waste is the whole reason you're shopping, the port kits at the bottom of the picks are a better answer than this feeder.

How it compares

RentACoop's 40 lb treadle feeder is the unit keepers cross-shop this against, and it undercuts it. The comparison comes up in every treadle thread we read. Nobody in those threads answers it. (One of the threads behind this review is titled, in full, "Grandpas feeder ripoffs", which is a fair summary of how crowded the copy market is at the cheap end.) We couldn't find a single owner who had run both, which is the largest hole in this review. One RentACoop owner does report that the sheet metal on their non-treadle feeder bends easily, and they say plainly that they don't know whether the treadle model is built the same way, so we aren't going to use it against the treadle model.

The cheap end of the category is where the money argument gets real. A VEVOR-style 40 lb treadle costs under a third of the Grandpa's and a 12 lb treadle costs less than a fifth. Nobody in the threads owns either one. We would expect the compromise to show up as thinner metal and a stiffer treadle, which matters most for exactly the light birds that struggle with a treadle in the first place, and we have no owner reports in either direction, which makes that a guess rather than a finding.

For a lot of readers the real competitor isn't another treadle feeder at all. If the problem is feed on the ground rather than rats in the run, a set of no-waste feed ports drilled into a bucket fixes the scatter for very little money. One keeper here runs a galvanized trash can with 45 degree PVC elbows instead, holds a whole 50 lb bag in it, and says the little birds leave it alone. He still has raccoons. We would take that trade for a covered run and not for one that floods.

Where we part company with the threads is on what a treadle feeder is for. The standard recommendation in every rodent thread is to buy one, with the implication that it solves the rat problem. It doesn't solve it. It removes the food, which stops the population growing and leaves the existing animals to find something else, and the one keeper here who got on top of rats bought a trap. Buy this feeder as feed storage that a rat can't open, and keep the two problems separate in your head.

Setting it up and training the flock

Set it on something flat and dry, against a wall, in the part of the run that stays driest. A paver or a scrap of ply keeps the base out of the mud and stops the treadle plate sinking into bedding, which is the most common self-inflicted problem with any treadle feeder. (Ply rots through eventually and a paver doesn't, which is the only reason both are worth mentioning.) Put it somewhere you pass every day rather than in the far corner. You want to be able to see into the tray without making a special trip.

Training takes two weeks at a minimum. The routine is the manufacturer's own, and week one has the lid propped fully open, so the birds eat out of what's effectively an open box and learn where the food lives. Week two, the lid and treadle are free to move a little but still stay open, so the birds get used to something shifting under their feet. After that it works normally and you stand there and watch. One keeper describes exactly those two weeks and still ended up with hens too frightened of the moving lid to approach it.

Take the old feeder away when you start, or they'll use it instead and never learn. Scatter a handful of scratch on the treadle plate for the first few days. If the flock hasn't taken to it after three weeks, the fix that worked for one keeper wasn't more patience: they brought in pullets that had been raised on a treadle feeder, and the rest of the flock copied them. Chickens learn feeding behavior from each other far more readily than from us, which is worth knowing before you buy a feeder that has to be learned.

Two things go on the calendar after that. Empty and wipe out the hopper at the change of season so caked feed doesn't sit in the bottom through a wet spell, and lift the lid to look at the tray every time you refill. That's the whole maintenance list. There's nothing to charge, nothing to program, and no battery to give up on the first hard freeze of the year.

The bottom line

We would buy the 40 lb Grandpa's for ten or more standard-size hens in a run with a visible rodent problem, and we would expect it to still be sitting there in ten years, with the caveat that nobody in these threads has owned one that long. It's the only feeder in this category with a body of ownership reports where nothing broke. That record is what the price buys. If rats and wild birds aren't taking your feed, you're paying a large premium to solve a problem you don't have.

Silkie and bantam keepers should buy the 20 lb model rather than a different brand, because it opens at 500grams/14oz where this one wants 900grams/2lb, and Seramas or anything else under a pound shouldn't be on a Grandpa's at all. Anyone with a run too narrow for 25 inches of steel plus a 9-inch tread plate wants the 20 lb model or the 12 lb treadle in the picks. Anyone whose complaint is feed on the ground rather than feed disappearing overnight should buy a bag of feed ports and drill a bucket. And anyone who wants to know how the Grandpa's compares against the RentACoop in a run over several winters is asking a question this review can't answer, because nobody in the threads has answered it either.

Final scores: Build Quality 7.9, Reliability and Safety 7.5, Value 6.5, for a weighted overall of 7.4. The Value score is the one doing the arguing, and it's low because the feeder costs what it costs while the thing it protects is a bag of feed. If more long-term reports turn up, we'll move the Build Quality score in whichever direction they point.