Rodent feed hoppers

Looking for ideas for a food dispensor. I have been running my colony for three months now, and i'm getting good yeild out of my eight 10 gallon tanks of mice.

I'm using carefresh bedding, silent spin wheels, and feeding mazuri rodent diet.

I am now looking to upgrade my setup for more automation. I bought a 9 nozzle variflow gravity waterer. But the food bowls have porven to be a health hazzard as the mice wil poop and pee all over there food in the bowls. I would like to make a cage at the side of each tank to contain food and also protect the water system lines.

Any ideas? what sized grating should i use? i don't want them to have to struggle for food.

The smartest move would be to get rid of the aquariums and build or buy a rodent rack. Something that uses cat litter pans suspended under wire. Food hoppers are the top and the water lines are safely away from the mice.

That being said, I have seen people take metal cans, such as 5lb coffee cans, and cut a hole 1/3 of the way around and half way up on each side. These holes were then covered with 1/4" hardware cloth and the cans filled with the food.
The drawback to this method is gravity doesn't feed the hopper and there will always be a dead bed in the middle of the can.

Another option is to make a wire box out of hardware cloth similar to squirrel feeders that hold the square blocks. Fashion this to hang on the side of the tank down to rodent level.

It's difficult to protect the plastic water lines inside the tank, but one option there would be to get some copper tubing that the lines will just fit through. The lower end of the tubing can be bent slightly to angle the valve in for easier access.

None of these solutions are ideal, by far the easiest and cleanest way to raise mice as feeders is to do it in racks.

The cost of racks scared me away from them. I could get 10 gallon tanks for $10 each so for $100 i have a setup that holds 120 mice. The Hardware cloth idea appears to be the correct solution. i was also looking at some diamond shaped extruted aluminum to fashion hoppers out of.

if i made a mesh hopper for each tank i could safly run the water line thru the hopper safley.

Can the mice easily eat thru the wire mesh?

You actually could run the water line through the hopper to protect it, I didn't think of that.
The mice will not chew through the hardware cloth at all, it's a very common material in rodent cages.

As for the cost I was thinking more about building the rack as opposed to buying one. If you have a few tools and a little skill you can build a rack for a small fraction of the cost of the professional ones.
I have a 20 slot mouse rack that can hold 120 breeders which I have maybe $75 in. The majority of that was the water system.
I too cannot justify paying $2K plus for a commercial grade mouse rack when I can build the same thing for less than a tenth of that .

Hmm .5 inch or .25 inch squares? i'm guessing larger is better?

Small mice will crawl through the .5 inch. Depends on whether you mind pulling mice out of the feed hoppers before filling them.

I looked at the .25 and it just seemed way too small to eat from, SO i got the .5 and i will see how it works out. I will be keeping a close eye on it, Any large chunks of food being stolen and stashed in the cage or mice getting there heads stuck will get the .25 implemented

Any large chunks of food being stolen and stashed in the cage or mice getting there heads stuck will get the .25 implemented

Both of those will happen....

I tried using the 1/2 inch mesh way back. Both of those things did happen. The 1/4 inch mesh is plenty big for mice or African Soft Furs to eat through.