Ground control notes
The hydration problem nobody sees
Cats descend from desert hunters who drank almost nothing — which is why the water bowl needs engineering, not luck.
Cats inherited their thirst from desert ancestors who got most of their moisture from prey. A house cat on dry food inherits the same weak thirst drive with none of the moisture — a mismatch that quietly stresses kidneys and urinary tracts for years before anyone notices. Veterinary visits for urinary trouble track this directly.
The standard advice is a fountain, but the standard fountain has a dirty secret: it recirculates the same water past a foam filter, around and around, collecting hair and mouth bacteria until the weekly wash. Cats — who can smell staleness humans cannot — often drink from it reluctantly or go back to the dripping tap.
The design we ship attacks the actual problem: old water is drained into a separate wastewater tank and replaced with fresh from a clean reservoir, so what is in the bowl was never in a cat's mouth before. A stainless bowl removes the plastic taste and the biofilm cling; the missing filter removes the subscription and the guilt of forgetting to change it.
Whatever hardware you run, the metrics are the same: a healthy cat should drink roughly 50 ml per kilogram per day counting food moisture, the bowl should live away from the litter box and food, and any sudden change in drinking — either direction — is a vet call, not a shrug.