Cat Water Fountain Review: Months of Daily Use With a Picky Tabby

Juniper would not drink from a bowl. Not the ceramic one, not the stainless one, not the shallow dish I set down beside her food in the laundry room. For most of a year, the only water my cat would touch came out of the bathroom faucet, which meant she parked herself on the sink twice a night and yelled until somebody turned the tap on. Glen got very good at doing it without fully waking up. I got very good at getting out of bed. That is the exact problem the Veken 95oz water fountain was supposed to fix, and ten months later I can tell you it fixed it, with two or three caveats I would want to know about before spending my own money again.

Some context, so you know what kind of house this thing lives in. Juniper is four, short-haired, ten pounds, indoor only, and picky about where she eats, where she sleeps, and which water she considers acceptable. Our beagle mix, Biscuit, cannot get near the fountain because it sits in the laundry room next to her food and the gate keeps him out. Nobody sent me this Veken fountain. Nobody at the company knows I exist. I rinsed it every week since early this year and here is the honest accounting.

How I've Used It

It sits on the floor in the corner of the laundry room that gets no direct sun, about three feet from Juniper's bowl. The pump goes into the base and the cord runs out to the wall outlet. The listing says six feet of cord, and six feet got me from the outlet to that corner without an extension cord, which was a small relief in a room that already has enough going on.

Filling it is simple. There is a water-level window on the front and I top it off every second or third day depending on how warm the house is. The capacity is listed at 95 ounces, just under three quarts, and in this house with one cat that is four or five days of water before the pump starts sounding hollow and I know to refill. When I take the whole thing apart for the weekly rinse, I flip the switch on the cord, unplug it, and set the pieces on the left side of the sink so they do not get knocked around.

The weekly rinse takes me about eight minutes once I stopped doing it in a hurry. I lift the top off, empty the base, wipe the inside down with a paper towel because a slick film builds up on the plastic, and rinse the pump under the tap. The pump is the part worth slowing down for. There is a small impeller inside the housing, and the first two months I rinsed the outside of the pump and called it done. By the third month the flow had thinned out to a trickle and I could not figure out why. Glen took the housing apart on the kitchen counter with a butter knife, worked the impeller loose with a toothpick, and pulled out a gray wad of cat hair and grit that had been choking it. Flow came back to normal in about a minute. Now I take the impeller out every single week and I have not had a repeat. The filter gets changed closer to monthly in my house. The instructions ask for the pump cleaned and the filter changed every one to two weeks, and I will be straight with you, I do not hit that on the filter. If you are the type who cleans a bowl when it looks dirty, read the next few sections carefully before you order.

The Two Flow Modes, and Which One She Picked

The fountain has two settings. One is a flower waterfall, where the water spills over the top in a little curtain. The other is a gentler fountain with less splash. Both run off the same pump and the same switch on the cord, so switching is a matter of taking the top apart and setting it back together the other way. I started on the waterfall for the first week because the listing makes it sound like the fun one, and Juniper ignored it completely. I switched to the gentle setting and she was drinking out of it that same evening. Three days after that she stopped asking for the bathroom faucet.

I have tried the waterfall again since, just to see. She will drink from it now, but she still prefers the quiet mode. So it goes. If your cat is nervy about new things, start quiet and skip the experiment.

The blue LED and the water-level window are the two features that surprised me by mattering more than I thought they would. The window I check every morning, one glance from the doorway when I let Biscuit out to the yard. The LED is bright enough that I can see the water moving from across the room without turning on the laundry light, which is genuinely useful at 5:30 in the morning when I am not at my best. It is also bright enough that I noticed it glowing through the door crack the first week and thought about taping over it. I got used to it. How much that bothers you depends on how much darkness you want in a laundry room.

Ten Months In: What Held Up and What Didn't

Ten months is long enough that the new-toy feeling is gone and I am just living with the thing. The pump still runs. It is louder than it was when it was new. Not loud enough to hear from the kitchen, loud enough that I notice it in the laundry room when the house is quiet. The weekly pump cleaning is what keeps it at that volume. When I skip a week, I can hear the difference by Wednesday.

The plastic has held up better than I expected for something that gets emptied and refilled every week. There are fine scratches on the inside of the base from my paper towel habit and nothing has cracked. No leaks. The water-level window still reads true. The parts that have aged are the filter, which is a consumable, and the pump, which is also a consumable if you are lazy about it.

There was one scare worth mentioning because it will probably happen to somebody else. In the middle of the summer, the fountain went quiet one afternoon while I was folding towels two feet away. No hum, no water moving, nothing. My first thought was that the pump had finally died at month seven and I had wasted my money. I unplugged it, carried it to the sink, and found the real problem: the water had dropped below the level the pump needs and it had shut itself off rather than run dry. Juniper had been slapping at the surface again. I filled it, plugged it back in, and it started right up. It has done that twice more since, always after a heat wave when she drinks more than usual. I check the window more often now in July and August.

The habit it created is the part I did not expect. Juniper drinks at night, mostly, and she drinks longer than she ever did at the sink. She used to take four or five licks and hop down. Now she stands there for a while. I am not going to tell you that means anything medical, because I am a school office manager, not a vet. I will tell you that a cat who would not touch standing water now drinks several times a day without being carried to it, and that is the whole reason I bought the thing.

What did not hold up was my first assumption, which was that a cat who drinks from a tap is a cat who will drink from anything that moves. It took three days and one mode change. If yours is more stubborn than Juniper, give it a full week and try the other setting before you decide you wasted your money.

The Parts I Don't Love

It is plastic. All of it that matters: the top, the base, the spout. Plastic in a laundry room with a cat behind a gate is fine, and it is also the reason for the film I wipe out every week. Stainless would be easier to keep clean and I did not buy one, so I am not going to pretend I know exactly how much better it would be.

The cleaning schedule is real. Two pieces of it, the pump and the filter, are on a cycle that never ends. If you are the sort of person who cleans a bowl when it looks dirty, this fountain will annoy you, because it rarely looks dirty. It just starts sounding wrong. The listing is honest about the one to two week interval, but plenty of people will read that after they get it home and decide it is too much fuss.

And the light. I will say it plainly: it is a bright blue light in a room where I sometimes want no light at all. It does its job well. I would still pay a few dollars more for a version with a dimmer.

One more, and this is my cat's fault, not the fountain's. Under three quarts sounds like plenty until you live with a cat who slaps the surface of the water for fun. Juniper does that, so I top it off more often than the math suggests I should have to.

Why This One and Not the Others I Looked At

I looked at three kinds before I ordered. Taller fountains with a bigger drop, stainless steel models, and the elaborate ones with more pieces and more corners for water to sit in. I went with this one for boring reasons. The capacity was right for one cat, the price was in the range I was willing to spend on something I was not sure would work, and the footprint fit in the corner of the laundry room without blocking the door swing.

I measured that corner before I ordered, because the laundry room door swings into it and I did not want to move a litter box to make room for a water dish. The Veken unit is listed at a touch over eight inches square and about five inches tall. Eight inches square is smaller than the mixing bowl I had been using for Juniper's water, and it tucked in behind the door swing with a couple of inches to spare. If the listing had said ten inches, I would have kept looking. It is worth putting a tape measure on your floor before you order any fountain, because these things look smaller in photographs than they do in a laundry room.

The taller ones worried me because Biscuit is food motivated and foolish about new objects, and anything with a high spout he could reach is a thing he would try to knock over. Keeping the fountain behind the gate solved that no matter which model I picked. If you have a dog with free run of the house, plan for that before you buy any fountain, not just this one.

The stainless models I skipped because I wanted to test the whole idea cheaply before committing to something nicer. Ten months in, if this one dies, I will look at stainless first. The two modes and the water-level window are the parts I would want to keep. The plastic is the part I would trade away.

Three days after I switched it to the quiet setting, she stopped asking for the bathroom faucet. Ten months later she still has not asked.

Who This Is For

This is for the person with a cat who follows them into the bathroom. If your cat sits on the sink and waits for a tap, or drinks from a mug you left on the counter, or ignores a bowl that has been sitting out since morning, this fountain is aimed squarely at that animal. One cat, indoor, a laundry room or a kitchen corner with an outlet nearby, and somebody in the house willing to spend eight minutes a week on it. That is the deal.

It also suits a household like mine, where the fountain needs to live somewhere a dog cannot get to. The gate does most of that work. If you have a small apartment and no way to separate the animals, keep thinking about placement before you order.

Who Should Skip It

Skip it if you know you will not clean a pump. Not might not. Will not. A neglected fountain is worse than a bowl, because it circulates water it is not really cleaning, and the noise will drive you up a wall before the cat ever complains. Skip it, too, if you want something that runs on a battery or sits anywhere without a cord, because this one is corded and needs an outlet.

And skip it if you are looking for a fountain with a lot of settings and extras. This is a plain machine. Two flow modes, one light, one switch on the cord, and a filter you change on a schedule. If that sounds like too little, you want a different product and probably a bigger budget.