After 7 weeks of waiting for it to be delivered we could finally to put together the 2x2x2 metre enclosure.
The enclosure is really handy for when I’m not home. I can put the bunnies in there, with food, water and toys and they will be happy for a long while with plenty of room to play. The size 2x2x2 is OK for a small yard with a couple of bunnies.
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.
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.
Warning
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 to put it together. 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 and 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.
The clips
There are three different types of clips they give you.
Single Run Clips
Description
The different sides of the single 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.
Omlet needs to:
Make a tighter fitting clip. There’s no excuse for making a loose fitting clip that is used to support the entire structure. Also think about the material it is manufactured from – are they only supposed to last max. 1 year out there in the weather? Not suitable for the Australian climate.
Double Run clips
Description
The different sides of the double clip. You can see in the “open” clip (bottom left) that the adjoining plastic is stretched.
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.
Omlet needs to:
Make sure the adjoining plastic strip can withstand being flattened. Maybe manufacture the clip so it is flat, rather than curved.
The Pole clip
Description
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.
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.
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?
They loved it. It became their new litter box. Cotton and Buttons still slept in their usual place.
It wasn’t until I cleaned them in the morning that I realised that the darned tray in the Eglu has holes in it, and all my bunnies pee leaked out onto the floor. From that day onwards, the Eglu became an outside thing.
Warning
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 Bottle
These are the instructions you get with the water bottle.
The bottle is sturdy and clearly marked with the 600ml measurement, which is really handy; however, 600ml is a full bottle, not to the wavy line three quarters up the bottle.
Most of the time the wavy line signifies how far the water should be filled to.
If the wavy line was to signify the 600ml mark, it should be closer to the neck of the bottle, which would be upside down.
The bottle has the instructions on it in case you lose the bit of paper.
The end of the spout has a ball bearing in it that rolls forward and backwards. This is a good idea to limit the amount of water that comes out of the upside down bottle, but it is really hard to get water out of if you aren’t a lick-drinker like bunnies. Bunnies don’t stand there and lick the ball to get water. They sip water, so the ball is useless for bunnies.
If the bottle is tilted the ball rolls into the spout.
The bottle and lid are really good quality. The inside of the lid has a valve and washer which control the water flow into the spout.
The bottle is easy to fill. If you’re going to use it, make sure you wash it really well first – both bottle and lid.
However, no matter what you do (according to the instructions you shake or squeeze the bottle to stop it dripping) the bottle still leaks.
You don’t get a way to connect it to anywhere other than inside the Eglu Go hutch, so I strapped it to the pen with a piece of hay twine. Cotton immediately sniffed it. Buttons ignored it completely. They didn’t drink out of it, they rather their water bowl.
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.
Hay rack closed. You can see the bottle holder at the top.
Hay rack open. The distance between the wires on the sides are too wide, and Cotton could get her head up to her eyes between the bars.
The hay rack also closes easily, there is no way of securing it so that it stays open.
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.
I purchased this platform set up:
You get the 4x platforms, 2x ramps, the green house, pink tunnel and the dangley food thing.
Let’s start with the quality of the Zippy platforms. They are amazing. The top is flat with a slight bumpiness for grip, it also makes it easier for water to drip off.
The back is sturdy, and has a green wire border which is clamped on with screws. This green metal structure is used with the single clips to connect to the mesh of the enclosure and the platforms.
I was sent 4 panels.
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.
Ok, so… there was no information on the Omlet website at the time that I purchased the Zippy platforms to say they don’t fit the enclosure I purchased. I had no idea that they would be the wrong size. I contacted Omlet and they updated the information – but it was too late for me. The next part of the review shows how the platforms don’t fit in the enclosure.
Danger
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.
The arrows are pointing to the metal supports.
This photo shows the amount (circled in red) that two Zippy platforms overlap the centre post. When placed next to each other, you can see that the platforms overlap the middle pole, which means that it is impossible to put 4 platforms next to each other to span the width of the 2x2x2 enclosure.
Here the four panels are on the ground and you can see that the fourth one (the one on the far right) overlaps the whole enclosure by about 20 cm.
This shows that by making it a 2×2 platform, it would only be stable on two sides of the enclosure. Not enough stability for bunnies.
Even in a “L” shape, the platforms wont fit properly in the enclosure.
If you want to fit 4 platforms next to each other, they don’t fit in the enclosure. If you want to put them in a 2×2 arrangement as shown in the Omlet picture, they wont be supported on two sides. The platforms will fold in the middle. There is not enough support to hold the platforms up.
So, how are the metal structures used to support the platforms? And, how can single run clips be used to connect the platforms to the mesh of the enclosure to make it stable?
This is dangerous and ridiculous.
The platforms must be supported on all four sides to be stable enough for rabbits. Or, at least from the ceiling of the enclosure, or the ground with legs.
Danger
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.
What this says to me is that these platforms were created for another sized enclosure entirely. For this or any other rabbit enclosure, they need to be manufactured larger so there’s one platform for each mesh segment, or smaller so that 4 can fit across the enclosure. This seems to be an oversight.
Zippy Ramps
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.
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.
The different components to make the the platform and ramp contraption.
The red dots show where they recommend putting the single run clips to connect the ramp to the platform.
When you want to connect the ramp to the platform, you have to use the single run clips to connect the green wires together. This is not very stable, especially when it is high above the ground and it has nothing to connect to on the ground itself.
Tunnels
It took Cotton and Buttons about 30 minutes 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.
Green Tunnels
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 – at the time of purchase they were $50 each.
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 the connector ring which is used to connect green tunnels together.
The connector ring must be put together when you first get it. You have to screw in 4 screws for the hinge at the back, and then 4 screws on the front for the opening mechanism.
The connector fits nicely on the end of each tunnel. All you need to do is lay it all on the ground and then shut the second half of the connector over the top of the tunnels.
This is the connector being closed around the tunnels.
The top of the connector has two black buttons which you press to open the connector. It works very similar to a cable tie, but one you can undo.
This is the hinge mechanism at the back of the connector ring.
The connector ring has built in holes for air.
The tunnels also have slits for air flow.
Warning
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.
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. |