Archive for the ‘waste’ Category

Robotic kitty litter trays

Sunday, July 20th, 2008

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.

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Reusing grey water

Monday, July 7th, 2008

When I was at Grand Designs Live, one of the products I stumbled upon was Ecoplay, from CME Sanitary Systems. They system is a fairly small and compact processing unit for grey water, e.g. shower and bath water, cleaning out the muck and making it clean enough to use for flushing the toilet. It’s a great idea – reducing the amount of water that we use by up to 30%. From the website:

Greywater from the bath and shower is collected in the Ecoplay cleaning tank where a skimmer removes surface debris such as foam, hairs and soap. Heavier waste particles sink to the bottom and are flushed away to waste. The remaining ‘clean’ greywater is then transferred to a storage tank ready for use in toilet flushing. The storage capacity of the system is 100 litres – sufficient for approximately 20 flushes.

Intelligent operation:

* If the toilets are not flushed within 24 hours after a period of regular use, (e.g. when the house is empty) the system purges any retained water to waste
* This also cleans the system and prevents retained water becoming stale
* The system then draws in a minimal amount of fresh mains water to allow toilet flushing
* A power failure causes all stored water to be drained off immediately

Not only that, but Ecoplay means that you can subtract water used for flushing toilet from your water calculations when your home is being assessed against the Code for Sustainable Homes, allowing you to improve your rating.

The only aspect about Ecoplay that I wasn’t sure about was whether there is an issue with the waste from the Ecoplay system – basically all the bits that it skims and filters out of the waste water before it gets pumped back into the toilet system – and off-grid water processing. I did ask the chap at their stand, but he didn’t seem to quite understand what I was was asking, so I gave up. I guess I just need to learn a lot more about off-grid water processing so I can figure it out for myself.

Posted in waste, water | Comments Off

My composting needs

Saturday, April 12th, 2008

When I was a kid, we had a compost heap. All fruit and vegetable waste, like potato peelings and apple cores, went on the compost heap, although meat scraps did not, as we didn’t want to attract rats. After a while, Dad would dig out the compost from the bottom of the heap and bung it on the garden. Easy!

We don’t have a garden, so our food waste goes into a small brown bucket, which is left out for collection each week. If we remember. The bucket is too small for our weekly needs – the bigger one that the council left us got stolen! – and it gets mouldy quickly. I hate it. I insist it’s kept outside, on the landing, and I make Kevin put it out each week.

Recently a group of German scientists have warned that these pre-compost food waste bins are a danger to our health, primarily because of airborne mould spores getting into people’s lungs:

Harald Morr, a leading pneumologist, who is also chairman of the German Lung Foundation, said studies showed that airborne mould spores from organic waste could lead to allergic reactions, asthma attacks, hayfever-like symptoms and itchy skin lesions.

“Even just opening the lid of a bin containing organic waste can cause mould spores to be stirred up which, if breathed in, can damage the lungs,” said Morr. “The more spores breathed in, the worse the repercussions on one’s health can be.”

The recycling system here in Islington is really awful. We have small- or medium-sized buckets which have to hold a week’s waste, or more if we forget to put the bucket out or the collectors decide not to bother (which seems to sometimes happen). It’s completely inadequate for our needs, and I shudder to think how many mould spores it produces.

In contrast, in Dorset my parents’ have got a large brown wheelie bin so they can use composting bin bags in their small bucket and when it is full they can put it outside into the large wheelie bin. This means that their bucket never gets too mucky and, because the waste is enclosed in a special bag, the wheelie bin never gets too mucky either.

But I’m not a fan of the wheelie bin approach either. When we finally get round to building, I would prefer to install a system where I can put all waste into some sort of sink unit, akin to a waste disposal unit, but instead of being chewed up and spat out into the sewerage system, it gets chewed up and spat into a composting system.

I would very much prefer not to have to ferry half-rotting food about, or have to keep going outside to put it in a big composting box. It would be much more civilised to be able to automate the composting system and treat all composting in a holistic manner. If you’re going to compost your poo and your kitchen waste, you may as well do it together if you can.

I’ve had a look online, but I haven’t seen any system that does this. I found small self-contained units that sit under the sink, but that’s not what I want. I’m wondering if such a system even exists. I think a lot more research is going to be needed, or I may have to design the thing myself. If you know of any systems that sound like they might be what I want, let me know via email or Twitter (just @kitsandmortar me)!

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