I was browsing through the Way of Cats blog when I came across their review of Litter Robot II - an automated litter tray which self-cleans and provides always-fresh litter for the kitties. Clean litter is deeply important to most cats, and they’ll refuse to use a litter tray if it doesn’t come up to snuff.

Anyway, I did a bit of digging (no pun intended), and it seems that many automated litter trays require that you buy either special silica gel crystal littler, or litter that comes in a special cartridge that fits in the bottom of the unit, which seems expensive and wasteful to me. ScoopFree, for example, requires you to change a tray cartridge of crystal litter every 30 days (although users report that you have to change it more often, for some, every five days) and many reviewers on Amazon report that the tray begins to stink pretty quickly.

The Litter Maid is another rake-based system which, like the ScoopFree, drags a rake through the litter to gather the poo at one end of the tray and conceal it. Unlike the ScoopFree, the Litter Maid uses clumping litter, not crystals, but it does require a special ‘waste receptacle’ which you have to continue buying for the lifetime of the litter tray. According to reviews, the rake-based systems tend to have problems getting jammed, which doesn’t sound so great.

Then there’s the CatGenie, a litter tray that uses washable litter and which actually acts more like a toilet, with the solids being liquidised so that they can be flushed away into your mains waste outlet, and the liquids being rinsed out of the litter and, again, flushed away. The entire system is cleaned using a special ‘SaniSolution’, which, of course, you have to keep buying (it’s their version of the waste receptacle/tray cartridge, I guess).

Now whilst it sounds like a good idea, the reviews on Amazon tell a different story. The system can get clogged up with poo and hair which requires manual unclogging. (Mmm! Poo soup!) It can overflow - remember that you’re pumping water into this thing - and at least one review that I read was from someone who’d had her house seriously flooded. Others have actually had to get plumbers in to hook the thing up to the mains. (It’s well worth reading this review, if only for the laugh.)

So this brings me to the Litter Robot, which has an entirely different design. Rather than having a rake or a flushing mechanism, the Litter Robot is a globe that does a sort of rotating sifting thing… you know, this video explains it better than I can describe it:

The main problems, from the negative reviews on Amazon, seem to be either that the cat doesn’t want to use it, or that there are mechanical issues. There are also issues with big cats ‘overshooting’, and ending up standing with their back to the door and pooping on the step instead of in the litter. One the plus points, you don’t need special poo receptacles so you can use normal bin bags, and any decent clumping litter will do, so it’s cheaper to run.

But all of these automated solutions have problems, and none of them are cheap. but if the customer reviews are anything to go by, then the Litter Robot comes out ahead, with far fewer bad reviews than good. Indeed, if you count 5 and 4 star reviews as good, and 3, 2, and 1 star reviews as bad, it pans out like this:

• Litter Robot - 85% good, 15% bad (196 reviews)
• Scoop Free - 76% good, 24% bad (128 reviews)
• Cat Genie - 68% good, 32% bad (309 reviews)
• Litter Maid - 52% good, 48% bad (491 reviews)

Whilst it might seem like an extravagance to have an automated litter tray, for an indoor cat it could be really useful to ensure that they always have a clean place to go. And any reduction in contact between humans and cat faeces also reduces your chances of catching toxoplasmosis.

It’s going to be a while before Kev and I get to have cats, so by the time we are ready for our Litter Robot I hope many of the problems will have been ironed out.