My husband read somewhere that Pomeranians are drawn to running water. At the time, Beignet (Benny to us) almost never drank from his bowl, and that worried me more than I let on.
So we bought the PetLibro Dockstream fountain. More than a year later, all three Poms use it, and Beignet treats the spout as his personal drinking cup. Whatever instinct my husband read about, it turned out to be real, at least in our house.
Here’s the honest version of what living with it has been like.
Why running water works for a dog who won’t drink
Plenty of dogs and cats prefer moving water to a still bowl. It’s the whole reason fountains exist. We can’t tell you we settled the science. We can tell you what happened: Beignet went from ignoring his bowl to drinking every day.
The other two came around in their own ways. Bella, our senior, was hesitant for the first week or so before she trusted it. Boqui, as a puppy, was so eager he’d plant both front paws in the stainless steel tray to reach the spout.
For a small breed, steady drinking matters. It quietly shows up in energy and coat condition. We’re not vets, and a Pom who suddenly stops drinking is a vet conversation, not a gadget purchase. But if yours is simply a lazy bowl-drinker, a fountain is a low-stakes thing to try.
The fountain didn't just hold water. It changed whether our pickiest drinker drank at all.
What it’s actually like to live with
The thing I worried about most was mess, and it never materialized. The flow is gentle and the tray catches it, so there’s no splashing on the floor.
We keep a small absorbent pad underneath it anyway, but that’s for Pom drool around the spout, not for the fountain itself. With three faces taking turns at it, a little drool is the only cleanup we deal with.
The one real annoyance is that it has to be plugged in, and there’s a cordless model in the lineup if that’s a dealbreaker. Boqui chews everything he can reach, so I braced for trouble with the cord, but he’s never once been drawn to it. If your dog is a determined chewer, route and protect the cord anyway.
Keeping it clean is the part people skip
PetLibro recommends replacing the filter every two weeks and cleaning the tank, pump, and tray weekly. We tie cleaning to refills, which keeps it from becoming a separate chore I forget — the same logic behind how we approach cleaning the house with three dogs.
The refill rhythm has been easy to predict:
- With two dogs, we refilled about once a week, which lined up neatly with cleaning day
- With three, it’s closer to every 4 to 5 days
- In summer, when there are more bugs and bits of debris around, we clean more often than the schedule says
The cleaning itself takes me only a few minutes:
- Remove the stainless steel tray and wash it with soap, along with the spout
- Wash the basin
- Take the filter apart (it comes apart easily) and wash each piece
The nice part is you don’t have to dry anything. Everything goes straight back into water, so a quick wash and reassemble is the whole job.
Do not skip taking the filter apart and cleaning it. Left alone, it gets genuinely gross. The tray, spout, and basin are the easy part; the filter is the piece that actually goes bad if you ignore it.
This is also the honest dealbreaker. If you know yourself well enough to know you won’t keep up with the cleaning and the filter changes, spare yourself the money and don’t buy this. A fountain nobody maintains is worse than a bowl you rinse out.
The replacement filters are a small recurring cost worth planning for, and we use the official PetLibro ones. None of the parts are dishwasher-safe, so it’s a hand-wash job either way.
The “smart” features, honestly
The Dockstream connects to Wi-Fi and a phone app, and PetLibro leans hard on its hydration tracking. Here’s the honest split on what we actually use.
What earns its keep:
- Empty-tank alert, a real help for not letting it run dry between refills
- Filter-change reminder, the maintenance I’d otherwise forget, which the app just tells me
What we ignore is the hydration tracking. It only follows one pet at a time, so with three Poms sharing one fountain the numbers don’t mean much. For our purposes, the dashboard was pointless from the start.
Buy this fountain for the running water, not the hydration app.
Which Dockstream Is This Review About? (Original vs Dockstream 2 vs Cordless)
Everything in this review is the original plug-in Dockstream Smart Fountain (PLWF105). It’s the one that’s been running in our kitchen every day for over a year. PetLibro now sells several fountains under the Dockstream name, and the search results blur them together, so here’s a quick map before you buy the wrong one.
- Dockstream Smart Fountain (plug-in): ours. Continuous flow, plus a Wi-Fi app with the refill and filter alerts we actually use.
- Dockstream Cordless: battery-powered, no app. It dispenses water when it senses your dog approach instead of flowing all the time. We chose the plug-in on purpose. Beignet needed to see water already moving to drink it.
- Dockstream 2 (plug-in and cordless): the newer generation. Redesigned straight tank, integrated pump, dual-band Wi-Fi. The Dockstream 2 cordless is the first battery model that keeps the app alerts. PetLibro’s own comparison page has the full breakdown.
- Dockstream RFID: reads a collar tag so the app can tell pets apart. That solves the single-pet tracking limit below, but we’ve never needed it.
We haven’t tested the Dockstream 2 yet, so this review is about the original. Its upgrades build on what already works for us: running water, a low tray, and quiet. We’re looking forward to trying it, and we’ll update this review once we have.
What Owner Reviews Complain About (And What We’ve Actually Hit)
Search “Dockstream reviews and complaints” and you’ll see the same three gripes over and over. Here’s how they hold up after more than a year in our house:
- “The filter upkeep is constant.” True, and it’s our dealbreaker too. The filter needs replacing every two weeks and cleaning in between, and it’s the one part that gets gross if you skip it. If you already know you won’t keep up with it, don’t buy a fountain. Any fountain.
- “It has to stay plugged in.” True, and it still bugs us. Our chew-everything puppy never touched the cord in a year, which helped, but if a cord’s a dealbreaker for you, the cordless models above exist.
- “The app tracking is a gimmick.” Agreed, mostly. The hydration dashboard only tracks one pet, so we ignored it from day one. But the empty-tank alert and filter reminder make the Wi-Fi worth it.
What we haven’t hit in over a year: pump noise, splashing, or a failure of any kind. Ours has needed nothing but the cleaning schedule.
A cat fountain that works for small dogs
It’s worth saying plainly: PetLibro markets the Dockstream primarily for cats. All three of our Poms took to it without any trouble, and the low stainless tray sits at a height even a puppy could reach.
The cat-first design also explains the single-pet tracking limit, which becomes a non-issue if, like us, you skip the tracking entirely. The water flows for everyone at once regardless of how many dogs you have.
Is the PetLibro Dockstream right for your Pom?
It’s a good fit if your Pom ignores the bowl, you want filtered water that stays fresh, and you don’t mind a plug plus light weekly upkeep. That describes most of the homes our readers are running.
Look elsewhere if you specifically want a cordless fountain (PetLibro makes a battery-operated version), or if the health-tracking dashboard is the whole reason you’re buying. On the second point, we’d gently talk you out of it.
The model we’ve used and are reviewing is the plug-in PLWF105. The model map above sorts out the rest of the lineup.
More than a year in, it’s one of the few gadgets in the house I’d buy again without thinking twice. Anything to get my dogs to actually drink water.
