SONGMICS Small Animal Playpen, 144 x 74cm

The SONGMICS LPC016W01 is the third pick in this guide, and at £29.99 it is the cheapest item on the list. It is a panel enclosure — semi-transparent plastic panels joined by connectors, a removable fabric top and a water-resistant mat — and the same listing calls it, at different points, a 'small animal playpen', an 'indoor rabbit cage' and a 'guinea pig cage'. The number that decides it is the flat floor: 144 x 74 cm, which works out at 1.07 square metres on one level. The £99.95 cage at the top of this guide has a per-level footprint of 100 x 54 cm, or 0.54 square metres. The cheaper product therefore offers roughly double the floor area per level of the most expensive one, for under a third of the money.

Two numbers in the listing are worth reading carefully. The star histogram shown on the page adds up to 100 ratings — 68 at five stars, 17 at four, 8 at three, 2 at two and 5 at one — against the 154 ratings quoted on that same page. And of the four reviews displayed, none mentions a guinea pig: the animals named are a tortoise, day-old chicks and kittens. That does not make it a bad guinea pig cage, since 1.07 square metres of single-level floor is the figure that matters, but it does mean the reviews are not evidence about guinea pigs. Everything on this page is taken from the Amazon listing and its specification table, not from testing we carried out ourselves.