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| Customer Reviews: | | Average Customer Review: ( 146 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
66 of 67 found the following review helpful:
 CONFUSED Sep 13, 2009
By G. Rubin
"Gadget Geek!"
I've had the Drinkwell fountain for a couple of years, great product. Once a month I take it apart and throw everything except for the pump in the dishwasher. Works great!! Unless you don't own a dishwasher - forget the brushes.
115 of 121 found the following review helpful:
 Bad product design Jan 04, 2008
By SM-NM Catboy
My complaint for these brushes is the poor product design, specifically, with the tips of the biggest and the smallest brushes. To clean around all the sharp corners well, it is important for the tips of these brushes to be covered with a lot of bristles. Guess what, the tip of the smallest brush is prety much dominated by the metal wires, so when you try to clean, instead of getting the bristles to touch and rub against the surfaces, it's mostly the metal wires that come into contact. Last time I checked, it's the bristles that clean, not the metal wire. Same with the biggest brush: The way the metal wires wrap around the sponge tip to hold it to the handle prevents the sponge from coming into full contact with the surfaces.
The product designers for the brushes don't deserve to be product designers. Do you know how much it takes to design a simple floor mop? A lot. A good product designer has to think about which yarn absorbs water well, how much water to absorb so the mop won't be hard to wring, what wringing mechanism to use, how long the handle should be, how thick the handle should be, how the mop head comes into contact with the floor, and so forth, in order to maximize ease of use and effectiveness.
The designers of the brushes are a failure. It seems that not much thought went into the design. Yes, we are dealing with just brushes, but even brushes should do the job they are supposed to do well.
35 of 36 found the following review helpful:
Great sizes, bad construction Apr 23, 2008
By E. L. Fough
I am glad for the sizes but the construction is poor and the bristles too stiff to do a good job cleaning. I still have to break out the pipe cleaners for the small spots and the rag for the large. The bristles don't bush out at the end so when you push the brush into the well, you are scraping the metal end against the bottom - the metal end doesn't do a great job scrubbing the residue off the bottom of the well.
Bamboo makes a Kong cleaner with a suction cup that is better designed and has a small brush in the handle. You'll still need the pipe cleaner for the smaller pieces though.
19 of 21 found the following review helpful:
 bad product Feb 20, 2010
By Pam Young (a.k.a. Tzaddi)
At first I created my own cleaning kit--bent pipe cleaners, sawed off sponges, and chop sticks wrapped in clean paper tower with rubber bands. It worked well enough or so I thought. That was in the beginning. In time, my approach didn't work anymore. There are so many sharp edges and nooks and crannies. Designer errors. Finally, I bought the cleaning kit especially designed for the Drinkwell Original Pet Fountain. LOL! The only one of those three over-priced kitchen brushes that actually cleans anything is the small pipe cleaner bent at the end, and its only job is to remove pet hair trapped inside the propeller housing of the water pump. The designers of this product obviously were not the ones who cleaned it. I'll be looking at their later products-- to see if they've learned anything about knife edge columns (duh) and all those other bacteria-breeding places in the filter housing. And I'll actually go into a store where they can take that sucker out of the box and let me examine each piece before I get too excited about their claims. It's not that I don't clean the fountain. I clean this stupid fountain much more frequently than the "...about every two weeks" recommended by the manual, and I still feel badly for my innocent pets because of all those places where I know that bacteria can thrive. Today I used a round-tip knife to clean the yuck in the bottom of the filter housing and it was my best idea so far. But excuse me, should I really have to work this hard for a $50 water fountain? I'd love to see the designers and company executives completely dependent on this fountain as the sole source of their water! I'll bet improvements would happen then-- probably before the end of a single day!
9 of 9 found the following review helpful:
Not al All Useful Mar 21, 2011
By carpoozie22
I really like the platinum Drinkwell and our three kittens adore it. I was skeptical on making this purchase because the reviews appeared to be convincing on both sides. I decided to give it a try as I wanted to have the correct accessories for the item, it was not overly expensive and there were a lot of positive reviews. Well the low raters were correct.
The bristles are way too stiff, sparse and uneven. They are held together with twisted hanger-like metal wire, only thicker, which has no give for speedy scrubbing. Therefore, you are either "scratching" surfaces with the tips of the longest bristles or in an effort to get more of the brush to clean the surface you push it down to flatten the brush, it is still scratchy.
Moreover, the bristles do not spread the cleaning agents evenly, and the large brush with sponge-end does not fit in all the places that would be practical to use the sponge. The tip of every brush (including the large bottle brush with the sponge) has a loop of wire. Therefore you wind up scratching corners instead of cleaning them.
The brushes are not well anchored into the plastic handles. Repeated pressure trying to get them to clean efficiently eventually makes the wires loosen in the plastic handle.
I find nothing special in the design or materials of this product that make cleaning the Drinkwell any easier. The opposite is true for me. Well researched design and materials would be worth it--these are anything but.
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