The short answer: a power cut usually leaves the hardware intact and breaks the recovery instead. Two owner reports from the past week show what that looks like. A Granary owner wrote on 2026-10-31 that his feeder reads one long press as several short ones, so the 3-second press its reset needs never completes. A PETKIT EverSweet Ultra owner wrote on 2026-10-29 that after a restart the drain and refill ran at 11:37 PM instead of the hour he had set, on both of his units. PETLIBRO sells the Granary 2 at $129.99 with 24 hours of backup power and a 24-month warranty. None of that helps if the reset needs a person who is not there.

I read both threads twice, first for the fault and then for what the owner had already ruled out, because the second list is the one that decides whether a fix exists. Then I opened the two product pages and the warranty policy, looking for the instructions those owners were trying to follow. Neither page documents the reset sequence in any detail, and that absence is the story.

petiqlab earns a commission from the Amazon links on this page. Everything below comes from owner threads, manufacturer pages and policies read between 2026-10-24 and 2026-11-02, with every link listed at the end.

What does a feeder reset ask of you, and who has to be in the room?

A reset is an input event. Someone holds a button for three seconds, or pulls a plug for a minute, or presses a sequence. The machine does not know the house is empty.

PETLIBRO publishes one number that sounds like an answer to this problem. The Granary 2 page says the feeder has a “built-in rechargeable battery that provides up to 24 hours of backup power”, and the same page prices the unit at $129.99. Twenty-four hours covers a storm. It does not cover a four-day trip, and by the time the battery is flat the house may still have no power to restore.

Device	What brings it back	Who has to be there
Granary 2 feeder, PL-AF105-01W	A 3-second hold on the reset button	A person standing at the unit
EverSweet Ultra fountain, W7H-WH	A full power cycle at the socket	A person at the wall
Any cloud feeder after a router reboot	The unit rejoining the network by itself	Nobody, if it works

The third row is the one worth testing, because it is the only row that was designed to recover without help. The first two rows are procedures, and a procedure is a task that somebody has to perform.

PETLIBRO prices the Granary 2 feeder at $129.99, lists a built-in rechargeable battery rated at up to 24 hours of backup power, and states a 24-month warranty. Owners of the PL-AF105-01W report that the required 3-second hold never completes, because the button reads one long press as several short ones. That same Granary owner had already replaced the cable, the power supply and the wall outlet, then reinstalled the app before posting. On the EverSweet Ultra fountain, model W7H-WH, a PETKIT owner documented a drain and refill cycle starting at 11:37 PM after power was restored, against a 6 AM schedule, on two units bought weeks apart. Switching the EverSweet off and back on restored the schedule. Sure Petcare’s SureFeed microchip feeder runs on four C cells for roughly 6 months, stores 32 identities, carries a 3-year warranty, and needs no router at all. Granary and EverSweet both need a person standing at the unit after an outage. SureFeed needs nobody.

Why does one PETLIBRO Granary press register as four resets?

The thread is titled “Buttons on Granary feeder won’t work”, posted to r/Petlibro on 2026-10-31. The paragraph that matters is this one:

whenever I press the reset or unlock button, the feeder registers what should be a single long press as multiple separate presses. Because of this, I am unable to complete the required 3 second long press to unlock or reset the device.

What he describes is an input-decoding failure, not a power failure. The feeder is alive enough to read a button. It just cannot read that button the way its own procedure requires.

A press is not one signal. It is a stream of make-and-break events, and firmware counts them. Hold a good switch for three seconds and it looks like one continuous contact. Hold a chattering one and it looks like four taps, each closed for a fraction of a second, so the counter resets before the hold finishes. Nothing in the app changes that, because the app is not in the path between the finger and the switch.

He had already replaced the cable, the power supply and the wall outlet, and he had tried the app as well. Four substitutions, none of which touch the switch. The thread reports no hardware reset entry on the unit, which leaves a person holding a button that will not cooperate.

That is the part I would put on a sticky note before a trip. A feeder can fail in a way that its own recovery procedure cannot reach, and the failure will look like a dead feeder from a distance.

Why does the cat fountain flush at 11:37 PM?

The second report comes from r/PETKIT on 2026-10-29, in a thread about an EverSweet Ultra that keeps misbehaving after the power is cut.

when the power is turned off for whatever reason and restarted, the operating system inside the fountain does not revert to the set time for drain flush and refill. I don’t know what the time is based on. … It’s 11:37 PM. That’s not the time set. … turning it off and turning it back on will get it to reset. … I have two fountains bought weeks apart, so it’s not the fountains, it’s your software

The feature behind that cycle is real and documented. PETKIT describes the Ultra as a fountain that sends fresh water to the tray and drains used water out through a “OneWay Mechanism”, and sells the camera version at $224.99 under SKU W7H-WH. A drain and refill cycle at 6 AM is the machine doing the job it advertises. The same cycle at 11:37 PM is the machine doing it on the wrong clock.

Two units bought weeks apart behaving the same way is the strongest detail in the thread, because it removes the usual explanations. It is not a bad solenoid in one box. It points at a time base, and a time base has two possible designs. Either the clock keeps running on a small backup and drifts, or it waits for a network round trip to set itself and runs on whatever it last held. PETKIT has not published which design the Ultra uses. What the owner found is that a full power cycle puts the schedule right, which is a workaround rather than a fix, and it needs somebody at the socket every time the power blinks.

His account of the company’s response is that the fault could not be reproduced. I have no way to check that from here, and I am not calling anyone dishonest. A fault that appears only after an unclean shutdown is genuinely hard to reproduce on a bench.

Does the warranty cover the part or the procedure?

PETLIBRO’s policy is specific on paper. It gives a 24-month warranty, a 30-day return window, and a list of parts excluded as normal wear, which includes batteries, the feeder rotor, desiccant bags, fountain filters and placemats. None of those clauses is unusual. The question is what happens when the failure is a procedure rather than a component.

Two owner accounts answer that. The first came in on 2026-10-30, from a customer on her third PETLIBRO fountain and her second failure inside the warranty period:

Despite providing proof of purchase, troubleshooting the product, and submitting video evidence twice, customer service continued requesting more documentation. When I finally pushed back after being asked for a THIRD video, they informed me that they couldn’t replace the defective product or its parts. Their solution? Offer me 20% off a new model. … All of this over a $45 fountain.

The second is a Granary camera feeder owner who wrote on 2026-10-24 that the unit has not worked since one of the AWS outages, that he contacted support in August, got a reply 40 days later in September, requested a refund under warranty on October 1, and has heard nothing since. He ends by asking whether his best option is a complaint to his state attorney general.

Set those against the brand’s public numbers. Trustpilot carried 1,083 reviews for petlibro.com and a reply rate of 75% on negative reviews when the page was read on 2026-11-01. A reply rate is not a resolution rate, and both of the accounts above involve a reply or a ticket rather than silence from the start.

The pattern is not that PETLIBRO ignores everyone. It is that the path through the ticket system runs through a person who has to be persuaded, and a device that needs a press has the same shape of problem. Both depend on someone being available.

PETLIBRO’s published policy offers a 24-month warranty and a 30-day return window, and excludes batteries, the feeder rotor, desiccant bags, fountain filters and placemats as normal wear. Trustpilot carried 1,083 reviews for petlibro.com on 2026-11-01, with a 75% reply rate on negative reviews, which measures replies rather than resolutions. One owner reported on 2026-10-30 that a second failure inside the warranty period drew a third video request and then 20% off a $45 fountain instead of a replacement. Another, on 2026-10-24, waited 40 days for a reply after an August ticket, requested a refund on October 1, and heard nothing. PetSafe sells the Smart Feed at $134.99 with 24 cups, up to 12 meals a day, and a 45-day return window. Sure Petcare’s SureFeed lists a 400 ml bowl, 32 registered identities and a 3-year warranty. PETKIT sells the EverSweet 3 Pro with a 1.6 litre tank, 60 ml held in the tray, and a replacement pump sold separately at $15.99.

What should you test in the twelve minutes before the next storm?

None of this is worth discovering on the day you leave. Five checks, run once, tell you what your own setup does when the power goes.

1. Pull the router for 30 minutes. Leave the feeder powered and on its schedule. If a meal does not dispense, the schedule is not as local as the marketing suggests. The local scheduling promise covers why this test matters more than the spec sheet.
2. Cut mains power for 60 seconds. Restore it and watch the unit without opening the app. A device that needs the app to come back is a device that needs you.
3. Compare clocks. Read the time on the unit and the time on your phone, then cut the power again and repeat. A drifting clock shows up here first, and a fountain that flushes at the wrong hour is one symptom of it. The clock checks around daylight saving use the same method.
4. Perform the reset the manual describes. Count the seconds out loud. If the hold does not register on the first attempt, try three times, because an intermittent switch will pass once and fail later.
5. Write the procedure on a card and tape it to the machine. Anyone who feeds your cat while you are away needs the sequence and the button location, not a link to a support article.

The battery side of the same question, including what a feeder’s published runtime really covers, is in the power outage and battery guide. This page is about the minute after the power returns, which is where the procedures live.

What comes back without anyone pressing anything

Three options, each with a different trade.

The SureFeed Microchip Pet Feeder has no app, no account and no router in its chain. Sure Petcare lists four C cells for about six months, 32 stored identities, a 400 ml bowl with a sealed lid and a 3-year warranty. An outage changes nothing except that the bowl still opens for the cat whose chip is registered. It is available as B00O0UIPTY.

The PetSafe Smart Feed keeps the schedule on the device and runs on four D cells when the adaptor is unplugged. The published capacity is 24 cups, up to 12 meals a day, 1/8 cup to 4 cups per meal, at $134.99 with a 45-day return window. It is the pick this site has used for simple single-cat feeding since the August outage, and it is listed at B07NR47N2Q.

The third option is the least clever. A corded fountain with a pump you can buy separately has no recovery step, because the pump starts when the socket does. The PETKIT EverSweet 3 Pro is the one this site recommends, with a SUS 304 stainless tank, a rating under 25 dB, 1.6 litres of capacity with 60 ml held in the tray, and a replacement wireless pump sold separately at $15.99. PETKIT states plainly that it has to stay plugged in to pump, so the trade is placement freedom for a machine with no schedule to lose. Amazon lists it at B09QRH6L3M.

Three disclosures. petiqlab has not run any of these units in a lab, so the figures above are the manufacturers’ own. There is no affiliate link to any PETLIBRO product on this page, because the feeder line sits in the negative column of our position register and two more reports do not change that. And the EverSweet Ultra, the fountain in the second report, is a different product from the 3 Pro recommended here, at $224.99 against a corded model that asks nothing of you after an outage.

If you already own the Granary, the useful step this week is the fourth check. Hold the button and count. If it takes three attempts to register, the reset you are relying on is already unreliable, and the trip plan should assume a person rather than a procedure.

FAQ

Why won’t my feeder reset after a power cut?

The most common reason in this week’s reports is the button rather than the board. A Granary owner wrote on 2026-10-31 that his unit registers one long press as several short ones, so the 3-second hold never completes. He had already swapped the cable, the power supply and the outlet, and reinstalled the app. If yours behaves the same way, the input has failed while the machine still boots, which is a different fault from a dead unit and a harder one to fix remotely.

Does the Granary 2 battery cover a long trip?

No. PETLIBRO states that the Granary 2 carries a built-in rechargeable battery providing up to 24 hours of backup power, at $129.99. That covers a storm and an evening without mains. It does not cover four days away, and it does nothing for a fault in the button or the network link rather than the power supply, which is why the published figure should be read as a floor for short cuts rather than a promise for trips.

Why did my fountain flush at the wrong time after a restart?

An EverSweet Ultra owner reported that on 2026-10-29. After the power was cut and restored, the fountain ran its drain, flush and refill at 11:37 PM instead of the 6 AM he had set, and a second unit bought weeks apart did the same. Switching it off and back on corrected the schedule. Either the clock has no backup or it waits for a server to set the time, and PETKIT has not published which.

Does a smart feeder keep feeding while it is offline?

It depends on where the schedule lives, and the app does not show you. PETLIBRO said during the August 2026 outage that locally stored schedules would keep running, and owners documented missed meals anyway. A separate report from 2026-10-24 describes a feeder that did not rejoin the network after a router reboot and then stopped running scheduled meals until it was manually reset.

What does the warranty cover after an outage?

PETLIBRO offers 24 months of warranty and a 30-day return, and names batteries, the feeder rotor, desiccant bags, fountain filters and placemats as wear parts that are excluded. Owners describe a harder negotiation. One wrote on 2026-10-30 that a third video request on a $45 fountain ended with an offer of 20% off a new model rather than a replacement. The clause list is the part to read before you count on the term.

How do I test recovery before I travel?

Five checks. Unplug the router for 30 minutes and see whether a scheduled meal still dispenses. Cut mains power for 60 seconds and watch whether the unit rejoins without the app. Compare the clock on the unit with your phone, twice. Perform the manufacturer’s reset and count the hold. Then write the procedure on a card for whoever feeds the cat while you are away. If any check needs a person in the room, that unit cannot be your only plan.

Which devices come back without anyone pressing anything?

A battery-only microchip feeder does. Sure Petcare lists four C cells for about six months, 32 stored identities and a 3-year warranty, with no app, account or router in the chain. The PetSafe Smart Feed keeps its schedule on the device and runs on four D cells, with 24 cups of capacity and up to 12 meals a day. A corded fountain such as the PETKIT EverSweet 3 Pro starts pumping when the socket does, because there is no clock to lose.

Updated: November 2, 2026. Sources: owner reports from r/Petlibro on 2026-10-31 about the Granary buttons, r/PETKIT on 2026-10-29 about the EverSweet Ultra schedule, r/Petlibro on 2026-10-24 about a feeder that stopped feeding after a router reboot, r/Petlibro on 2026-10-24 about a refund request after an AWS outage; the PETLIBRO Granary 2 Smart Feeder page read on 2026-11-02 ($129.99, PL-AF105-01W and PL-AF105-01B, 1 g bowl scale, Smart Refill and Scheduled Feeding modes, “up to 24 hours of backup power”, Petlibro Care required for habit-change alerts); the PETLIBRO refund policy (24-month warranty, 30-day return, batteries and feeder rotor named among normal wear parts); the PETKIT EverSweet Ultra product listing read on 2026-11-02 ($224.99, SKU W7H-WH, OneWay Mechanism draining used water and refilling the tray, one-tap tray clean, AI camera); the PETKIT EverSweet 3 Pro page and this site’s 3 Pro review for the corded model (SUS 304 tank, under 25 dB, 1.6 L with 60 ml in the tray, must stay plugged in to pump, $15.99 replacement pump); Sure Petcare and PetSafe figures from the manufacturers’ own product pages as read on 2026-09-14 (four C cells about six months, 32 identities, 400 ml bowl, 3-year warranty, 24 cups, up to 12 meals a day, 1/8 to 4 cups per meal, four D cells, $134.99, 45-day return); and a Trustpilot reading of petlibro.com on 2026-11-01 showing 1,083 reviews and a 75% reply rate on negative reviews. A 2026-10-30 Trustpilot review is the source of the $45 fountain and the 20% offer. Review text is quoted as owners published it, including spelling. Prices, terms and availability change, so verify them before you buy.