Finally, after 7 weeks of waiting, my order from Omlet arrived… After thoroughly researching the available array of living arrangements available for bunnies, I was not impressed. Most hutches are made out of fir or pine, neither woods are healthy for bunnies, yet they still feel they can sell them. This annoyed me to no end.
I wanted my bunnies to have a healthy lifestyle, so I started designing a hutch for them. I wanted it to be a modern design that had the in-built functionality to keep bunnies cool on a 40 degree day, or warm on a 4 degree day. It also had to be easy to clean and maintain. My only problem was, I had no way of making the hutch. I didn’t have tools and equipment available to me. So I had to look for alternatives.
After an extensive search, I found Omlet. A UK based company that manufactures modern living arrangements for small animals and chickens. I found exactly what I was looking for. A modern take on the boring hutch.
Although, I did have a few reservations about the stuff withstanding the Australian climate, especially along the Victorian south coast. I bit the green apple and I made an order on the 16th of August (Cotton and Button’s 3 month birthday). I then waited. There was a delay in deliveries, which said that it would be delivered on the 3rd September. It wasn’t.
The package got delivered to a depot in Melbourne, scanned in on the 13th September. I got a message that it will be delivered on the 19th September (a whole month later). Nope, it wasn’t.
I chased it up constantly; every couple of days. Still no luck. It ended up being delivered on 5th October. Sorry, that’s not good enough. Seven weeks wait for something to come from Sydney. That’s just plainly ridiculous.
Omlet Review
After days of rain, we finally were able to put together the 2x2x2 metre enclosure.
The enclosure with Cotton and Buttons exploring it for the first time.
I have their pen attached to the sides of the enclosure for a larger run.
In places it was awkward and needed 3 adults to build it, a ladder and a lot of patience, in other places it only needed myself. It looks easier to assemble than it actually is.
Within a couple of days the poles are starting to rust. I’d hate to think what it’s going to be like in a year.
The enclosure doesn’t come with protection from the elements, unless you pay extra for the small canvas wrap that would really do nothing for bunnies on a 30+ degree day in a tall 2x2x2 enclosure. I’m getting 90% block-out shade cloth to cover most of the enclosure for hot days. Bunnies prefer shade.
I must admit, it is a little flimsy for the price ($750.00). I don’t think it would withstand the usual 50-100km winds we get along the coast. I have to put it in a very protected place. But then, in a wind of 100km/hour, nowhere is safe in the garden.
Although I did also purchase a pack of 12 pegs to tie the enclosure down, but the ground is so tough that trying to screw them into it will most likely prove to be a waste of time. I’d rather get a set of cheap tent pegs – that would probably do a better job. Get yourself tent pegs to hold it down.
Also, the door isn’t wide enough to get the Eglu hutch in and out. That’s just bad design. You can get the attachment that changes one mesh panel to become an opening for the Eglu, so the hutch is outside the enclosure with the opening facing in. But that’s clearly an after thought. Build your enclosure around your Eglu.
What Omlet needs to do
It should be fast to dismantle and put up again.
Omlet should make it so that it folds away for those days of strong winds, bad rains (seeing that it rusts), or other Australian weather extremes. It also needs the wire frame around the base where the mesh panels that make up the walls and the floor connect. That way it will be much sturdier when moving (especially when mowing) – or even put wheels/casters on it to make it easier to shift around.
It would be fine in the UK without their strong winds, but in Australia, it’s a completely different story.
Redesign it to suit the Australian climate, make it stronger. Make the door wider to get the Eglu in and out easier. Stop making flimsy crap and selling it for an expensive price. Not value for money.
Door Latch
The handles that have to be screwed onto the doors are pretty cool. The latch is controlled by gravity. When tightening the screws for the latch on the back, don’t screw them in too hard. I tightened them up then twisted the screw one turn backwards, that way if the screws need to be replaced later on, they are easier to undo.
The latch also has a lever on the inside of the enclosure which makes it easy to open and close from the inside. BRILLIANT!
This is the latch open.
This is the latch half open.
This is the latch closed.
This is the lever on the back of the latch.
Update – Apr 2024 Spiders love living in the latch.
The Clips
There are three different types of clips they give you.
- Single run clip
- Double run clip
- Pole clip (has another fancy name that doesn’t mean much)
The different sides of the single clip.
Single Run Clip
These silly clips they get you to use to put the segments of wire together are stupid. They are too large to give any support around the wire. They loosely turn around the wires giving minimal support. One puff of wind and the whole enclosure is flat on the ground.
A zip-tie would be so much better. I do understand their reasoning though, the clips make it easy to pull the enclosure apart if needed. But still, why so loose?
The clips will also become brittle in the Australian climate. I give it a few months.
On a good note though, they are easy to undo, but they can be quite difficult to do up.
The different sides of the double clip. You can see in the “open” clip (bottom left) that the adjoining plastic is stretched.
Double Run Clip
Another joke. The concept is good, but in practice they stretch and break. Basically it is two single clips joined together with a strip of plastic in the middle.
You have to bend the adjoining plastic to flatten the clip out before use. This makes it brittle and stretch. Anyone knows that if coloured plastic turns white when bending, it is not too far from breaking. Well, expect that from these clips.
They are also really hard to use – connecting several things together at once. Takes patience, and steady fingers.
Once you figure out how to connect them to the enclosure mesh, it quickly becomes apparent that they are quite secure. Although still loose like the single clip. These clips are generally used to connect the floor/skirt to the bottom of the enclosure, so they rest against the ground. While connecting them to do get filled with dirt.
The different sides of the pole clip. The small bulb is where the wire fits, and the larger part wraps around the pole. The arm at the bottom secures the clip together.
Pole clip
These clips are good. However, the two things that annoyed me were that the wire doesn’t like staying in the smaller section, and the bottom arm doesn’t securely clip and undoes quite easily by itself. It’s quite often that I find one or two have undone over night and I have to secure them again before Cotton and Buttons are allowed in the enclosure.
They also break really easily in the seam, and you can find shattered ones on the ground around the pen because they explode at night. Always make sure you check the enclosure before putting bunnies in there, because they may get out.
The Eglu Hutch
The hutch is good. It comes flat packed and you have to put it together. It took me about an hour, maybe a bit over, because the first few instructions aren’t super clear. Once together, it is quite heavy and awkward, and if you’re impatient like me, building it inside may not prove to be the best option. Well… it was raining outside…
To get it through a normal sized door, you have to put it through sideways, and of course it’s hard to get a good grip on the sides.
I came up with a brilliant idea, why not use it as an extension to the cage inside?
The tray has holes in it for drainage. Don’t use the hutch inside without taking precautions. I learned the hard way.
Hutch Accessories
With the Eglu Go hutch you get a food bowl, which is exactly the same as an aluminium dog bowl, a water bottle and a hay wire rack.
Water Bowl
The dog bowl is good for water. Buttons loves picking things up and throwing them around. He can’t pick the bowl up.
The height of the sides are too tall for smaller bunnies or guinea pigs.
Water Bottle
The water bottle is stupid. Rabbits don’t lick water, they suck/sip water in when they drink. They drink out of puddles.
NEVER USE A WATER BOTTLE with rabbits, they can’t get enough water out of them. Use the bowl instead.
Hay Rack
The hay rack is pointless. The concept is good, but they are too dangerous for bunnies. Rabbits have strangled themselves with hay racks.
Zippy Platforms
Let me say one thing before continuing. Omlet makes really good quality items. They are fantastic. It’s just the design that leaves something to be desired. It is as though they had this stuff made for chickens, and then thought about including small animals like rabbits. The Zippy platforms are a great example of this.
The only thing is, I purchased the Zippy platforms without knowing that they wouldn’t fit the enclosure. They are made specifically for the Zippy system, not the enclosure I purchased. This, however, was not mentioned on the Omlet website until AFTER I complained about it to them. It should have been mentioned in the shopping cart, with a warning “these platforms do not fit your enclosure, have a look at these instead.”
So, I’m not going to whinge about them not fitting, but I will mention how well they are made.
The platforms are the wrong size.
Each panel comes with a single green wire structure. So, that’s 4 wire structures.
The wire structures are meant to be used to support the platforms up off the ground.
Two wire structures are connected at the smaller end with two wing nuts.
However, this is where the design fails the first time. The provided wing nuts are too large to turn past the wire supports in the structure.
That means the supports cannot join together for stability.
Let’s imagine that the wire supports can be screwed together. According to the image on the Omlet website two platforms are held up by two horizontal metal structures.
Also, according to the instructions that Omlet provides, the platforms have to be quite high off the ground. Rabbits will hurt themselves if the fall or jump off a high platform. How is this considered safe without a railing of some kind?
I get the fact that the platforms are good for kids because the rabbits are at the right height for them to pat them. But it isn’t safe for both bunny or child if the platform collapses.
Zippy Ramps
The ramps come folded in half, and you have to screw in the pole on the back to make them stable. This is fine. The ramps are really well designed and a very good quality.
Front of the ramp.
Back of the ramp.
My only question is, why can you only connect one side of the ramp to the platforms? Omlet has decided to not supply the connector on one end. Really, what difference does it make to have both ends with the connectors?
You can see the empty screw holes one the corners that are used to hold the connector in place.
Tunnels
It took Cotton and Buttons about 30 seconds to want to run through the tubes/tunnels/magic-portals-into-another-dimension, only because they don’t have stabilisers on the bottom and they roll around while the bunnies run through them. Now, I can’t get them out of them. They sleep in them, and create rabbit-blockages, which means the other bunny has to climb over the sleeping one to get through the tunnel.
Rabbits are made to go into tunnels and these tunnels are made for rabbits. The intrinsic connection between them both is amazing.
Here’s some tunnel pics before I get into the ingenious design of these tunnels.
Pink Tunnels
Let me start with the pink tunnels. They are collapsable, so they are easy to store. When collapsed they are about 20cm high, when open they are a bit over a metre in length.
One of the warnings that come with the pink tunnels is that you shouldn’t open them with the bunnies around because they make a loud noise and it can scare them. I’m purposely training Cotton and Buttons not to be scared of things, so when I opened it for the first time Cotton didn’t care too much, but Buttons went all long and skinny with his ears up. I went into the pen and opened the tunnel and closed it, explaining to Buttons that it was OK and it was the tunnel making the noise. He is OK with it now.
They now get excited when they see the tunnel coming, or hear the loud noise.
The grey chew-proof cuffs have to be screwed on with 5 screws. It’s pretty easy, but I recommend opening the tunnel and trying to get the screws into the downward part of the zig-zag design. That way the grey cuff is less likely to pop off over time.
The picture shows the screw in the upward part of the zig-zag how it is piercing the pink plastic.
The ink plastic is starting to stretch and distort. This is after using them for less than a month.
Be careful with the pink tunnels. They start to deteriorate in the light really quickly. The whole point of them is to have fun with your bunnies and not worry about whether they are going to break while using them within 2 weeks. They are supposed to be able to open and close, bend and stretch without breaking.
Don’t leave the pink tunnels outside in the weather. They will deteriorate.
Green Tunels
The green tunnels are really well designed. They are quite sturdy and don’t bend as much as the pink ones. The more green tunnels you purchase the more bendier the path will become. I purchased 2 green tunnels for two reasons:
- I wasn’t sure if they were large enough in diameter for my bunnies.
- They are expensive and wasn’t sure what they were like.
Omlet website doesn’t really explain on their website that the green tunnels are not collapsible (like the pink ones when they get compressed like an accordion), and this was actually surprising to me. I was expecting that they would. Now, after using them with Cotton and Buttons for a couple of weeks, I think it’s good that they don’t accordion up, because the pink tunnels are starting to stretch in areas and I’m sure in the next few weeks they will split and break.
I purchased a connector ring, which is used to connect green tunnels together.
Is Omlet worth it?
Yes and no.
| Item | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|
| Eglu Hutch | Great design. Nice weight. Won’t blow away in a strong wind. Doors are solid and have a nice “clunk” sound. | Too big to fit through enclosure door. Plastic colour bleaches in sun quickly. The tray slides easily and if active bunnies take a run up and put the breaks on the tray goes flying when the back door is open. There are air vents in the bottom of the hutch, spiders can crawl in. |
| Accessories | The food/water bowl is good. | The hay rack is too dangerous to use, and the water bottle is pointless. |
| Enclosure | Good size (2x2x2). Good quality materials. Latch is good quality. Easy to use. | Needs more stability, bends when moved. Rusting within 2 weeks in non-painted areas. |
| Clips | Silly design. Undo easily. Do not keep the enclosure stable. | |
| Platforms, ramps etc | Great quality. | Too small to fit safely in enclosure. Safety first. |