Wondering if anyone here has experience of the flaps that read that cat's microchip, and thereafter only admit that cat.
We have two cats and we have a
SureFlap DualScan cat flap.
It works well. It seems very reliable in that it always lets them out when they want to go out, and it always lets them in when they want to come in. I guess this means that the sensor that detects the microchip isn't too fussy about the
exact position of the cat relative to the flap; as long as the cat is in a sensible position the flap will unlock.
Training the sensor to recognise your cats isn't as easy as it could be though. Basically you have to put the cat flap into 'learning' node and then hold the cat up to the sensor. Obviously there's a risk that they might object to that.
The DualScan feature is intended to allow you to be selective about which cats are allowed out. For example if you have an indoor-only cat and one who is allowed outdoors, you can program it so that only one is allowed out. (It will allow both to come in, so if the indoor-only cat gets out somehow, it can get back in.) When we bought it, we thought this would be a handy feature when one of the cats needs to go to the vet; just turn off her outdoor access a few hours before the appointment time and we know we'll be able to find her in the house. However, unfortunately it's not that simple; to restrict one cat's access, you need to re-train the sensor to recognise the cat as an indoor-only cat, which means grabbing the cat and holding it up to the sensor. (And the same again after the vet appointment to re-learn it as an outdoor cat.) In practice we don't bother with this feature.
If I were buying now, I would consider paying a bit extra for the
WiFi enabled cat flap from the same manufacturers. The idea is that a simple mobile phone app allows you to enter the microchip numbers rather than having to hold the cat up to the sensor, toggle between in-and-out and indoor-only for a given cat, set curfew times, and so on. I think that would be really handy, but the product wasn't available when we needed to buy a cat flap.