COMESOON Elevated Dog Bowls Review: Months at Mealtime

Murphy is a 72 pound yellow Labrador mix with a soft mouth and no patience. For the first three years I had him, dinner was a chase. Two stainless bowls skidded across my kitchen tile, kibble sprayed the baseboards, and a thin trail of water followed him from the bowl to the back door for me to find in my socks at seven in the morning.

Eight months ago I set the COMESOON elevated dog bowls in that same corner of the kitchen, at the second-highest of the four heights, and stopped chasing. I am not going to tell you a bowl stand changed my life. I will tell you I have not mopped a spilled water bowl since, and around here that is the whole ballgame.

How I've Used It

The COMESOON stand went down on a Saturday eight months ago and it has run twice a day since, plus water, plus the odd scrap of leftover chicken I am not supposed to admit to feeding him. Murphy is six now. He came from the county shelter at age two, he is 72 pounds, and he has started to stiffen a little after our long walks, the way a big dog does when the years begin to add up. I set the stand at 10.75 inches, the second-highest of the four settings, and it has stayed there. The first actual meal out of it came on the Wednesday, because I set it up and then spent four days second-guessing myself. He circled it once, sniffed the rim, put his head in, and ate the whole bowl without lifting his head. That was the moment I stopped wondering whether I had wasted my money.

There was no assembly to speak of. The stand arrived with the two stainless bowls nested inside it and the legs folded underneath, and I had it on the floor and filled in under five minutes, with Dale reading the box in the doorway and offering opinions. Empty, it weighs 3.2 pounds and measures 16.8 by 10.1 inches at the base, so it occupies roughly the same square of tile the old bowls used to wander around on their own.

The legs also fold, and the whole thing comes apart, which matters more than I expected it to. There are days when I want to run the mop over that entire strip of floor without picking around anything, and the stand goes flat against the wall in the time it takes to move a chair. That folding business is also why I chose this over a heavier wooden stand I looked at, the kind that would be lovely in a magazine photograph and miserable to shift on a wet Saturday.

The Four Heights, and the One Murphy Actually Uses

The four settings are 3.7 inches, 9.2 inches, 10.75 inches and 12.36 inches. I started Murphy at 9.2 and moved him up after about two weeks, because at 9.2 his neck still angled down farther than I liked, and by the end of a meal his front paws were inching forward the way they used to with the bowls on the floor. At 10.75 his back runs close to level from shoulder to hip while he eats, and he stays put.

I changed it twice before I settled on 10.75 and once more to show Dale it could be done, and each time it took less time than filling both bowls. That is the whole of my experience with the height adjustment, which is the sort of thing you do three or four times in the life of a stand and then never think about again. Which is fine. I do not want to think about my dog's dinner any more than I already do. The change itself is a matter of taking the legs to the setting you want, and the adjustment points are plain enough that I never needed the box to work it out. I did once do it in a hurry with a full bowl in my other hand and got one side higher than the other, which I noticed immediately because the stand rocked on the tile. Ten seconds to fix, and I have not made that mistake since.

The lowest setting, 3.7 inches, is for a puppy or a small dog, and I will say plainly that I have not used it with a small dog. I can tell you that a 50 ounce bowl is a wide bowl, and a short-legged dog at 3.7 inches has a fair distance to reach over the rim to get at the far side. If I were feeding a terrier I would watch that for the first week before I decided anything.

What Two 50 Ounce Bowls Change About a Day

Two bowls, 50 ounces each, both stainless, both thicker steel than the set I replaced. The thickness is the detail I noticed first because I have a habit of judging the material before I judge the product. These have been dropped on tile, scrubbed by hand at the sink, stacked wet, and dropped again, and eight months on there is not a dent or a wobble in either one. The old pair had a shallow bend in the bottom by the end that made them sit crooked.

Murphy is a big dog who drinks like he has just crossed a desert, and 50 ounces carries him through most of a day, which means I fill the water bowl once in the morning and top it off in the evening instead of twice more in between. That is a small thing written down and a real thing at four in the afternoon when I am up to my elbows in quilt binding and somebody is clanking an empty bowl across the kitchen.

The listing rates the stand for dry food, wet food, water, indoor use, outdoor use and multiple pets. We only test three of those in this house, since Murphy is an only dog and the stand lives indoors by the back door. But the bowls are big enough that I would not hesitate to feed two dogs from it if we ever got a second, which we are not doing, and Dale can stop asking. I have run a handful of meals of wet food through these, cut with kibble to slow him down, and the bowls rinse clean without the film the old pair held onto. The steel does not seem to keep a smell either, which is a thing I did not know I cared about until Murphy started leaving a half eaten bowl by the door in July and I could not tell you now which bowl it was.

The Base, the Tile and the Puddle Problem

Before the COMESOON I tried the obvious things, and I want to be honest about how they went. First a rubber mat under the bowls, which Murphy's nose pushed to the edge of the tile inside a week and which curled at one corner where the mop kept catching it. Then a heavier ceramic bowl for water, which did not slide but did nothing at all about the water he carried with him when he walked away. The folded bath towel was the worst of the three, because it soaked through and then sat there damp against the tile until I noticed. The COMESOON stand has a non-slip base and 3.2 pounds of weight behind it, and the difference is that the whole stand stays where I put it while he works at the bowl.

I want to be straight with you, though. Water still gets on the floor. A big dog drinking from a bowl leaves drips around the base of it, and a Lab with a wet beard will carry a certain amount of the stuff across the tile with him. What changed is the scale. Instead of a trail from the bowl to the back door, I get a small damp ring roughly the size of the stand, and a dish towel by the sink handles it. If you are expecting this to end all water on your floor, it will not.

What it did end was the noise, and I did not see that coming. The clank and skid of a stainless bowl being pushed across tile at half past five in the morning was a fixture of my life for more than three years. The kitchen is quiet at feeding time now, which sounds like nothing, and is not.

Eight Months In: Steel, Seams and Washing

I quilt in the evenings, so I notice stitching, and I will tell you the honest thing about a steel bowl stand, which is that there is no stitching to notice. No fabric, no padding, no seam to split, nothing to fray at the corner after a winter of washes. For a woman who has sewn a replacement cover for a dog bed and re-stitched a car seat cover seam more than once, a piece of feeding gear with no soft parts is a genuine relief. There is nothing on this stand that wears out the way cloth wears out.

What I watch instead is the joints, and they have held. The legs still fold and lock as tightly as they did in the first week, the frame has not loosened where the bowls sit into it, and the height settings still hold where I set them with no creeping downward under a dog leaning on the front of the bowl. Eight months of twice-daily use from an enthusiastic 72 pound animal is not a lifetime test, but nothing about it feels close to wearing out.

The bowls get washed by hand at the sink with the rest of the dishes, and they dry in a rack by the window, and that is the entire maintenance routine. No parts to order, no batteries, no pads to replace. The stand itself gets wiped down when I do the floor.

What Still Bugs Me

Three things, and none of them are deal breakers, or I would not still be using it. First, the footprint is fixed at 16.8 by 10.1 inches, and in a small kitchen that is real estate. It sits by the back door because that is the only wall where it does not eat up counter space I need. Second, at 3.2 pounds you lift it to move it rather than sliding it, and if you are mopping one-handed with a dog underfoot you will notice. Third, those wide 50 ounce bowls are a stretch for a very small dog at the lowest height, and I would rather say so than have somebody find out with a Chihuahua.

Eight months, twice a day, and the stand has not walked an inch across my kitchen tile. I cannot say that about a single other thing Murphy eats out of.

Who This Is For

This is for the owner of a big dog, and I mean a big dog, the kind that turns a floor bowl into a hockey puck and leaves a lake behind it. It suits a tall or long-legged dog whose neck has to bend a long way down to a floor bowl, an older dog who is stiffening after walks the way Murphy is, and an older owner who would rather not bend to the floor twice a day either. It is also the sensible buy if you are bringing home a puppy and do not want to replace the bowl stand twice as the dog grows, since the same stand goes from 3.7 inches to 12.36 inches. And if your dog eats off tile, this is the COMESOON detail that will matter most to you.

Who Should Skip It

Skip it if your kitchen is tight enough that 16.8 by 10.1 inches of permanent floor is a genuine sacrifice, or if your dog is small enough that the lowest height plus a wide 50 ounce bowl is awkward, because a smaller stand with narrower bowls would serve you better. Skip it if what you actually need is a bowl that slows down a dog who inhales his food, since that is a different piece of equipment and this one does not claim to solve it. Skip it if you want a feeder that lives in the car and comes out at rest stops, because while the legs fold and it packs well, it is a stand, not a travel bowl. And skip it if you are hoping to eliminate every drop of water from your floor. Nobody has made that yet.