K&H Pet Products Thermo-Kitty Café Stainless/Black 12 ounce + 24 ounce

Why it's worth it

This is a heated double station for cats: a 12-ounce bowl for water, a 24-ounce bowl for food, both stainless and both dishwasher safe. At 30 watts it draws about half what the big dog bowls here do, and the lift-out dishes make daily cleanup painless.

If you feed cats outside, food freezes before water does. Wet food turns into a brick within an hour on a cold night, and a cat that shows up at midnight finds nothing it can eat. This is the only bowl here that handles both at once, which is why it's the default for people running a feral colony or looking after a porch cat.

The removable stainless dishes are the reason to choose this over a one-piece bowl. Older heated bowls make you unplug the whole thing and haul it to a sink. These lift right out. You dump them, run them through the dishwasher, and drop them back into the heated base. If raccoons visit your porch and foul the water — and they will — that's a two-minute job rather than a project.

From our review of 4 heated water bowls for outdoor pets

What we like

• +If you feed cats outside, food freezes before water does
• +The removable stainless dishes are the reason to choose this over a one-piece bowl
• +Owners in genuinely brutal places report the water staying liquid winter after winter, through blizzards and well below zero
• +The capacity tells you exactly who this is for

What to know

• –The food side runs warm, and that cuts both ways
• –It wants shelter. K&H says to keep it out of wind, snow and rain, and that isn't boilerplate — an exposed unit in a driving…