For what it's worth, I'm about as broke as they come right now, but I won't be buying any more cheap feeders.

The Sweeney and TH feeders just have a better design, completely apart from throwing the food better, being more reliable, etc. The control box is located inside the hopper so it's impossible for varmints to get to, especially if the lid, which is metal, is locked, which is of course not an option with a plastic barrel (the more expensive Aquapros also have this design, though they still have the problem of not throwing the food well). Whereas the cheap feeders, in a brilliant stroke of inspiration unrivaled in the history of modern machinery, have the control box below the hopper, or in other words closer to the ground - and thus varmints - than anything else on the feeder.

I had one of the $67 Moultries mounted on a floating wooden raft on a two-acre pond, angled such that about half the food went to the bluegill in the pond, and the other half went into a 4X3X2 PVC cage anchored to the dock, which currently has 150 coppernose bluegill 3-5" that I'm keeping caged until they get big enough to ID for sex, at which point the males are going into a 1.5 acre pond which just today got stocked with 200 grass shrimp and will soon be stocked with a few pounds of FHM. So a couple days ago I dropped the wing nut that keeps the plastic cover on the control box, into the pond; I went to Lowe's the next day to get another one, but by the time I got back out to the pond the cover was already nowhere to be found, and something had knocked the wires loose and chewed on one of them.

So I hooked the wires back up and it worked. I went to Lowe's and got some hardware cloth and put a makeshift but imperfect screen across 90% of the raft, and wrapped fence wire around the feeder mount poking out, hoping that would deter the critters until I could get a new control box cover. So today I got out there and the wires were knocked off the posts again, and had been gnawed further, and the feeder would come on but no food whatsoever was thrown. I've had the feeder a little over a month and it's ruined, simply because of an asinine design, whereas if I had gotten a feeder with the control box inside the hopper all would be well.