Bunnings Wanted Her Cat Fountain in Every Store in Australia. This Geelong Water Engineer Said No.

Bec Walsh, 42, had the offer every small maker waits for on the table in front of her. She turned it down in the room. It took her a night to explain it to her husband.

Posted Tue 4 Nov 2026 at 6:02am

The one page. Bec Walsh at the table in Hawthorn East, the morning she said no. (The Local Gazette: Liz Farrell)

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The offer was one page long.

It is a Thursday in March, in a meeting room on the fourth floor of an office in Hawthorn East, and Bec Walsh has read the page three times. Every Bunnings store in the country, in time for summer. A number beside it that is bigger than her salary at the plant that treats Geelong's drinking water, where she has worked for twelve years, and where her shift started this morning without her.

Her husband Dave, a chippy, did the sums on the back of an envelope the night before. The ute. A chunk off the mortgage. Bec dropping to three days a week. He left the envelope on the kitchen bench so she'd see it on her way out the door.

"They were lovely," she says. "Genuinely. They'd seen the fountain and they wanted it. And I sat there and I thought, you don't know what you're asking me to do to it."

She said no. In the room.

Then she drove an hour and a half back to Grovedale, on the south side of Geelong, and had to tell Dave.

"He didn't say anything for a bit," Bec says. "Then he said, you'd better have a good reason."

She did. It starts with a cat that died.

Smudge was the Walshes' first cat, a big grey boy they got the year they married. He was twelve when he started losing weight. Dr Anne Hogan, the vet in Belmont who has looked after the Walshes' animals for fifteen years, ran a blood test and said the two words most cat owners hear in the end: kidney disease. Smudge lasted eight months.

"She told me cats don't feel thirsty the way we do," Bec says. "He'd been running dry for years, and there's no way of seeing it. You find out when it's done."

Mabel came six months later, a tabby from a rescue out in Dandenong, and Bec made one promise about her. This one would drink. Bowls in three rooms. A tap left dripping in the ensuite. For five years it more or less worked.

Then, in the winter of 2024, Mabel started weeing on the bathmat.

Bladder infection, Dr Hogan said. Common in cats that don't drink much. Antibiotics, a bill north of four hundred dollars, and one instruction. Get her a fountain. Cats drink more from moving water.

Mabel wouldn't go near the bowl for a week. Archie, nine, and Tilly, six, took turns on the floor with a saucer.

So Bec went to buy a fountain. Petstock, which is Woolies now. Petbarn. The new pet aisle at Bunnings in Waurn Ponds, between the dog beds and the bird seed.

She picked up the first box and read the back the way she reads a lab sheet. A pump in a bowl. A sponge filter. The same water, round and round. She put it down and picked up the next one. Same pump. Twenty boxes, three shops, one machine.

"At work, if I let two litres of warm water go round in circles for three days, I'd be sacked," she says. "And here's a whole wall of it, and the vet's just told me to make her drink more of it."

But that was the plant talking, and she knew it. A town's water is not a cat bowl. Maybe there was something about cat fountains that thousands of owners knew and she didn't.

So that night she went looking for them. Reddit, the Facebook cat groups, every brand she could find.

What she found was the pink slime.

Thread after thread of cat people with photos of pink gunk on the filter, asking what it was. Every answer was a cleaning routine. Rinse it. Vinegar. Change the filter more often. One woman in Adelaide, Jo, whose cat had been on antibiotics three times in a year, asking whether anyone else's fountain did this, with a photo of her filter, four days old.

Nobody in any of the threads said the word bacteria.

"That's not a stain," Bec says. "That's what warm water grows when you give it three days. At the plant, it's a shutdown. In the pet aisle, it's a cleaning tip."

She went back to Jo's thread and read it from the top.

Jo's cat was Pepper, a six-year-old tortie. Three bladder infections in a year. The first two were antibiotics and a bill. The third was blood in the litter tray on a Sunday night, the emergency vet in Adelaide, and two nights on a drip, because by then Pepper had stopped weeing altogether. Jo had done everything the threads told her. Vinegar every Sunday. A new filter every fortnight. The toothbrush. She had thrown the first fountain out and bought the dearer one. The photo was of the filter out of the dearer one, four days after she had put it in, and it was pink. The last line of her post was, "I'm giving her the water the vet told me to give her. What am I doing wrong?"

Bec didn't have to think about it. At the plant, that pink film has a name, Serratia, and the day it shows up in a tank the water is off until the tank is clean. It grows where water is warm and the same water keeps coming back: in the filter first, because the filter is the one place every drop passes through, then behind the pump, in the parts a toothbrush never reaches. A fresh filter every fortnight is a fresh place for it to grow every fortnight. Pepper's infections were not bad luck. They were in the photo.

"Nothing," Bec says. "She was doing nothing wrong. The vet says moving water, so she buys a fountain, and the fountain is two litres of warm water with her cat's spit and her cat's dinner in it, going round and round for three days. That's not a water bowl. That's a culture. Serratia off the pump, salmonella off the food bowl, and the cat drinks it, and then the kids put their hands in it. At work I'd shut the whole line down for less. Pepper didn't have a bladder problem. She had a fountain problem."

Mabel was two weeks off her antibiotics and drinking out of a saucer. Dr Hogan had told Bec to buy a fountain. Every fountain on the shelf was Jo's. She was not going to put a bowl of bacteria on the floor and tell her cat to drink more of it.

"I sat at the kitchen table at one in the morning going, what is going on here," she says. "Every box in that aisle says it's for her health. And there wasn't one I'd let her near." Then she read the back of the box one more time, and understood the business she was looking at.

She started the way she starts at work, on paper, with four rules.

Three weekends at the desk in the spare room, with Tilly on the floor, and there was a drawing. Two tanks, a tray, a drain.

"I'd fixed the water," Bec says. "She didn't care."

By then it wasn't only about Mabel. Jo in Adelaide had posted again: a fourth round of antibiotics, and the vet talking about Pepper's kidneys. And the ute money was gone, the twelve thousand dollars put aside to replace Dave's, and Bec was into the savings. Every box that turned up at the door, Dave would look at it, and then look at her.

One night in the garage, after Mabel had walked past number five for the twentieth day running, Bec sat on the floor with the bank app open and said she was done. Nineteen thousand dollars. A fountain the cat won't drink from is a bucket, and she'd rather have the ute.

Dave didn't argue. He's a chippy, so his answer was a weekend's work. He lined the back half of the garage, built her a bench along the wall, ran power to it and plumbed in a sink. Then he started taking Saturday jobs.

So she went back out. Number six was lower and wider; Mabel drank from it twice and stopped. Number seven moved the water to the top of the tray, where a cat can see it move.

What sits on her kitchen floor today is number nine. A stainless tray. Under it, two sealed tanks, one clean, one used.

"Every six, nine or twelve hours, whichever you set, the tray empties into the used tank and fills again from the clean one," Bec says. "What she's drunk from never comes back, and the pump never touches it. Nothing gets its three days. Tip, top up, rinse. Done."

Kaz Petrie, the nurse at Dr Hogan's clinic who had held Smudge at the end, wanted one. Then the clinic. Then the rescue in Dandenong, forty cats and one volunteer who cleans the bowls. Dave built a website at the kitchen table from YouTube videos and swore at it for a month. They made fifty in the garage, on the bench he built.

Then a woman in Ballarat put two photos side by side in a cat group on Facebook: her old fountain after five days, and Bec's after five days. The fifty went in a week. They made two hundred. Dave drove the boxes to the courier depot in the ute after work.

Jo in Adelaide bought one. Pepper has not been back on antibiotics since. Bec won't claim that one. "I'll say what I can test," she says. "The water's clean. The rest is her cat."

And in March, Bunnings emailed.

See the fountain Bec wouldn't cut down

The room in Hawthorn East had a long table, a jug of water nobody touched, and the one page, face up in front of her. She had read it three times in the car park. She read it again.

Bunnings has to make money on every product it sells, across hundreds of stores, with staff and freight and floor space to pay for. Bec doesn't hold that against them. It's business. The number on the page was A$749. Bec sells it for close to a third of that.

"They didn't ask what it cost to make," she says. "They asked what the most was someone would pay. There's nothing else like it on any shelf, here or anywhere, so there's nothing next to it to keep the price honest."

Then she got to the word halfway down the page. Exclusive.

"Exclusive means it's theirs," she says. "It goes in at $749 with my name on it, and it sells, because it works. Then someone in an office works out what the parts cost, a factory overseas makes one that looks the same for a third of it, and mine comes off the shelf. That's how the aisle got full of the same pump. Three times my price, and I'd be the name on the box the day it went wrong."

So she thanked them, shook hands and said no. "If a family's going to spend their money on one, it should be the proper one."

Saying no felt good for about a week. Then the Walshes had to work out how to sell a cat fountain with no shelf, no catalogue, and a pet aisle full of the cheap ones.

Bunnings had wanted twenty thousand for the summer. The Walshes sold forty-one in the month after the meeting. Bec is still at the plant four days a week. Dave still does the Saturday jobs, and still drives to the courier depot after work. They make them a few hundred at a time, because that's what they can pay for up front, and when a batch is gone the next one is six weeks away. When Petstock runs a sale, they can't.

"I don't regret it," Bec says. "But I won't pretend it's been easy. When people ask why it's not at Bunnings, I tell them. I wanted the one on my floor to be the one you get."

The fountain is sold only through the Walshes' own website. You won't find it in Bunnings, Petstock or any other shop. It also means they carry the warranty themselves: a year against faults, and if it ever stops working, one email and a new one is on its way, without posting the old one back first. Bec reads every email herself, most nights after the kids are in bed.

"If someone's cat won't take to it, I want to hear it from them, not from a returns docket," she says. "Most come round inside a fortnight. I'll tell you where to put it and what to do with the old bowl."

From Trustpilot, as written.

Back in Grovedale, it is six in the morning and there is a soft gurgle under the tray by the pantry. Mabel walks in from the hallway, sits, and drinks for a long time. Then she walks off to find a patch of sun. Bec tips the used tank down the sink and fills the clean one from the tap. Thirty seconds. "That's the whole product," she says. "Water she hasn't drunk from yet." Nothing on this floor has ever had three days to grow.

Get the fountain Bec wouldn't cut down