Veken Cat Water Fountain: An Honest Review

I'll be honest with you. I bought the Veken Cat Water Fountain mostly because I was tired of watching Pepper ignore her water bowl. She is a 10-year-old indoor shorthair, 11 pounds, picky about everything, and she would rather sit on the windowsill and judge me than drink from a bowl that has been sitting out all day. I retired from the mail route a few years back, so I am home all day now, and I noticed she was barely drinking. That worried me more than I expected. So I ordered the Veken, figuring a moving stream of water might get her attention where a still bowl could not.

Six months later, I have opinions. Some of them are good. Some of them are the kind of thing I wish somebody had told me before I bought it. That is what this review is for. I am not a vet and I am not going to pretend to be one. I am just a guy in Tacoma who has spent half a year cleaning, refilling, and watching this thing work, and I will tell you exactly what that was like.

How I've Used It

I ordered it on a Tuesday and it showed up two days later, which was faster than I expected. I set the Veken up in the kitchen, on a mat by the back door where Pepper already liked to hang out. The mat is one of those rubber-backed ones, maybe two feet by three, and the fountain sits on it with room to spare. The tank holds 2.8 liters, which the box says is about 95 ounces. For us, that works out to roughly four or five days between refills, depending on how much Pepper drinks and how much evaporates. In the summer, with the windows open and the air moving, I top it off a little more often. In February, when the house is closed up and the heat is running, the water level barely moves between cleanings.

The fountain has a filter that sits in the top section, and the water flows down through it in a little stream. The stream is maybe half an inch wide, and it makes a soft splashing sound when it hits the lower basin. Pepper was suspicious for about a day. She sniffed it, batted at the stream once, and then decided it was the greatest thing in the house. By the second morning I caught her drinking from it three times before nine o'clock. Now she drinks from it several times a day, and I have watched her stand there and lap for a full minute, which is something she never did with a bowl. She would take a few sips from the bowl and walk away. With the Veken, she settles in like she is reading a good book.

I clean it every three or four days. That is the honest part. The Veken is not a set-it-and-forget-it machine. The pump comes apart, the filter needs replacing every few weeks, and if you skip a cleaning, you will know, because the pump starts to sound like a tiny washing machine. I learned that the hard way around week three, on a morning when I walked into the kitchen and heard a whine I could not place until I looked at the fountain.

Let me give you the exact routine, because this is the part the product photos skip. On cleaning day I unplug the fountain, carry the whole thing to the sink, and lift the top section off. The top holds the filter tray, and the tray collects more than I expected: a little cat hair, some dust from the kitchen, and once, a small leaf that must have blown in when I had the back door open. I rinse the tray under warm water, then pull the pump out of the bottom tank. The pump has a small cover that twists off, and inside is a little foam sponge and a rotor. I rinse the sponge until the water runs clear, wipe the rotor with my finger, and put it all back together. The whole job takes about ten minutes. It is not hard. It is just a thing that has to happen on a schedule, the way the trash has to go out. I do it on Mondays and Thursdays, same days I change the kitchen towel.

What Nobody Tells You Before You Buy

Here is the thing nobody puts in the product photos: the cord is short. I mean really short. I measured it one afternoon out of curiosity, and from the back of the pump to the plug it is maybe two and a half feet. The Veken has to sit within a few feet of an outlet, which in my kitchen meant rearranging where the toaster lives. The toaster now lives on the other counter, and Carol still reaches for it in the old spot sometimes. It is not a dealbreaker, but I wish I had known before I picked the spot. If your kitchen is short on outlets near the floor, measure first.

The second thing is the noise. When it is clean and full, the Veken is quiet. You can hear a soft trickle if you are standing right next to it, and honestly, I find that pleasant. It is the kind of sound that makes you think of a creek, not a machine. But the pump is not silent, and as the water level drops, the sound changes. By the third day after a refill, there is a faint gurgle, and by day five, if I have let it go, it turns into a whine that I can hear from the living room. If you are the kind of person who notices a new hum in the house, you will notice this one.

The third thing is the cleaning. I am not going to sugarcoat it. The Veken has several pieces, and every one of them needs to be washed by hand. The pump has a little sponge and a rotor that you have to pull apart and rinse. The filter tray collects hair and dust. The tank itself gets a film on the sides if you let it go too long. I found that film in the third week, when I got lazy and let the cleaning slide to six days. It was not a huge deal, a little scrubbing with a sponge took it off, but it reminded me that this fountain does not clean itself. None of it is hard, but it is a chore, and it is a chore that repeats every few days forever.

I want to add a fourth thing, because it surprised me the most. The Veken is light. When the tank is empty, the whole fountain weighs almost nothing, and Pepper can bump it across the mat when she is in a mood. She did it twice in the first month, both times in the evening when she was wound up after a nap. She has never knocked it over, but she has shoved it a few inches, and I have learned to check that it is still sitting flat before I walk away. A heavier base would have saved me that little daily check, and it would keep the water from sloshing when she bumps it mid-drink.

The honest truth: the Veken gets Pepper drinking more than her old bowl ever did, but it only stays quiet and clean if you stay on top of it.

The Filter and the Pump

The filter is a simple foam and charcoal thing that sits in the top. Veken sells replacements in multi-packs, and I bought a pack of six back in November. I have been changing mine about every three weeks, which means I am on my seventh or eighth filter now. The box says every two to four weeks, so I am right in the middle of that range. When the filter starts to look brown or the water starts to taste like, well, like old water, I change it. Pepper does not complain, but I can tell the difference. The water from a fresh filter tastes like nothing at all, which is exactly what water should taste like, and the water from a tired filter has a flat, dusty note that I do not like. If you are sensitive to that kind of thing, you will end up changing filters more often than the box suggests.

The pump is the part I was most worried about, because pumps are the thing that dies in appliances like this. Six months in, mine is still going strong. I have taken it apart, cleaned the rotor, and put it back together at least a dozen times, and it has not given me any trouble. The cord is the weak point, not the motor. I have to be careful when I move the fountain for cleaning, because the cord is short and I do not want to yank it. The spot where the cord leaves the pump is the only place I can imagine this thing failing, so I give it a wide berth with the sponge.

One thing I will say for the Veken pump: it is easy to take apart, and that matters more than it sounds. I have owned appliances where the pump was sealed and the only option was to buy a new one. Here, the cover twists off, the rotor slides out, and a rinse under the tap fixes most problems. When the pump got loud in week three, on a Thursday morning, I took it apart on the kitchen counter, found a bit of grit stuck to the rotor, rinsed it, and it was quiet again before my coffee was done. That is the kind of design I appreciate, because it means the fountain can last instead of ending up in a landfill. I would rather spend ten minutes cleaning a part than spend money replacing the whole thing.

What Pepper Thinks

Pepper is not easy to impress. She has turned her nose up at three different brands of wet food, two litter boxes, and a cat bed that cost more than my first car. She has a whole windowsill of spots she ignores in favor of a cardboard box on the dining room floor. So when she started drinking from the Veken within 24 hours, I took it as a genuine endorsement. I did not have to coax her, I did not have to hold her near it, she just walked over and started drinking on her own.

She drinks more now. I can tell because I am the one refilling the tank, and because she is not as quick to yowl at me when I walk past her bowl. The clearest sign came in January, on a cold stretch when she was spending most of her time on the radiator bed. I refilled the tank on a Monday night, and by Wednesday morning it was down a good third. Most of that was Pepper. Juno drinks from it once in a while, but she prefers her own bowl in the mudroom. Pepper still sleeps most of the day, because she is 10 and that is her job, but she gets up to drink more often than she used to. That alone made the purchase worth it to me.

There is one habit I did not expect. Pepper likes to sit on the mat next to the Veken and watch the stream, sometimes for a couple of minutes at a time. She does not always drink. Sometimes she just watches, head tilted, like she is trying to figure out where the water keeps coming from. I have started to think of it as her version of the aquarium at the dentist's office. It is not a problem, but if you are picturing a cat that only walks over for a quick lap, you might be picturing the wrong cat. Every cat is going to treat this thing differently, and Pepper's way is to treat it as both a drinking fountain and a piece of entertainment.

The Pros and Cons

Who This Is For

The Veken is for you if you have a cat that ignores her water bowl, if you are tired of refilling a bowl twice a day, or if you just want to give your cat a little more encouragement to stay hydrated. It is also for you if you do not mind a small weekly chore. If you are the kind of person who can wash a water bowl every day without complaint, you can handle the Veken.

I would also say the Veken is a good first fountain. It is simple, it is popular, and the replacement parts are easy to find, which matters when you are not sure whether your cat will even use the thing. You are not locking yourself into an expensive system. If Pepper had refused to drink from it, I would not have felt like I wasted a fortune.

Who Should Skip It

Skip the Veken if you want something you can ignore for a month. This fountain needs attention. It needs cleaning, it needs filter changes, and it needs a spot near an outlet. If you travel a lot, or if you are the kind of person who forgets to change the filter in your own water pitcher, this might become a source of guilt instead of a source of fresh water.

I would also say skip it if you have a very large dog in the house. The Veken is sized for a cat, and while our dog Juno has figured out how to drink from it, she has to crouch and she splashes water everywhere. If you are buying for a big dog, look for something with a taller reservoir. For a cat, the Veken is the right size.