Coolest Litterbox EVER

[Kohan]

I should buy a storage unit and start stocking cat litter to beat inflation.

[Zouri]

i had that litter box for about 2 months before selling it to some unsuspecting person on ebay.


First off, it is NOT low maintenence. In fact, i was fixing it more often than i was changing my 1 cat's litter. Tidy cat crystals
ftw. Its concept is a good one, but the flawlessly horrible execution is unparalled.
-The bowl always came off track and you had to knock it to make it move again.
-The litter arm occasionally would get poop stuck to it and would clean, then roast the turd. Trust me, cat shit roasted under a blow dryer after being soaked in a sanitizing solution smells worse than a litter box that was left unchecked for months.
-The plastic pellets would wind up EVERYWHERE. Not only did the cat track them out, the dryer blew them all over the place!
-The impellar blades, which are flemsy plastic ones, would constantly get clogged and make the stupid thing beep constantly until the jam was cleared. This means getting some long pointy object and shoving it at a piece of shit until it went through into the disgusting puddle of liquified cat shit.
-The term 'self flushing' replies to the boxes capability of dumping its contents into another recepticle. Most people used the toilet. Having it flush in the toilet would always leave the bathroom with the aromatic scent of week old festering liqified cat shit, that would obviously have to be manually flushed.
-If any single thing messed up while it was cleaning the plastic litter pellets, the thing would stop and beep. This left the entire bowl filled with water, plastic pellets, cleaning solution, cat urine, and maybe some feces. It left my cat with no where to use the litter box while i was gone. Since i am sometimes gone for days at a time, this contraption caused me to have to replace the carpeting in 1 room.
-If something got clogged in the flush cycle, you would have to take the machine apart and manually dump the resivour of shit, which either meant you had to disconnect everything and take it outside, or you had to stick your hand inside the resivour to release it.

If this sounds like your version of a good product, by all means, spend $300 on it. But i had it, i hated it, i sold it. and yes, every single thing i stated happened within my first 2 months of owning it.

[Ddz]

holy shit ^ the litterbox parade hath been raineth upon

I'll stick to my manual scoop & toss, it takes 5 minutes once a week.

[Kohan]

holy shit ^ the litterbox parade hath been raineth upon

Made the entire thread worth it, really.

[Emirii]

I never have a cat, but i have many other pets, mainly birds. Now for me, getting anything "automatic" would seem like a dream come true (like a self cleaning bird cage ne?) but i probably would have to stick with the old way because a. it would be too expensive and b. it would probably scare the birds/do some crazy stuff and c. probably not work very well. I never really trust all this "new" and "automatic" stuff until the other half of the general public tries it out first, lol.

[Ivve]

The combination of avatar, sig, and obnoxious shit above makes me feel like I'm being trolled. Seems like most people responding in the thread are cat owners, unless you own birds (ne?) and feel they're analogous. You may or may not be aware that this isn't the first automated cat box, though it's the first one I've seen that's boasted about being "self-flushing." If you'd had the misfortune of trying out the self-scooping variety of litter box, you probably would have circumnavigated this beast by a wide, wiiiiide path.

See, the problem is that all automated litter boxes have two main components that contribute to their overall fail:
1. Moving parts
2. Lack of human ability to perceive anything at all about anything going on in the box.

As we all know, cat shits come in all kind of different shapes, sizes, and consistencies. In almost 100% of cases, it's not the best idea to go scooping your cat's warm, soft shit the moment they step out of the box. Even the smartest cat owner has done this at least once because the smell was so horrendous that it couldn't be tolerated, and quickly discovered that no catshit is 100% perfectly coated in litter and thus when it's fresh and soft, it is going to leave some kind of residue on your scoop. It's also a fact that 100% of these litterboxes operate with a motion sensor so that they're going to do exactly that: scoop the hot, soft catshit immediately after the poor fucker gets out of the box. You can see the obvious problem here: one of the automated scooping boxes is always going to have shit on the scoop.

By the way, God help you if you have a cat that likes to hop out and scratch when the box is lidless -- these machines are truly terrifying to many cats and after a few incidents where they had contact with the automated parts, two of the six cats I had at the time would not even shit in the box anymore. This should be a major consideration if you ever plan to buy a cat box that has machine-powered anything. Will your cat freak the fuck out and refuse to go near the shitter from hell?

Back to the box itself, though. If anything at all in the box moves on wheels or has a track of any kind, you can expect to be spending hours and hours scrubbing the ground-up, gummy shit out of the crevices. What happens is that the shit breaks apart or clings to moving parts, falls onto the track, or otherwise goes anywhere it isn't supposed to -- and it will -- the moving parts continue to roll over the catshit over and over and over. Combine this with the fact that it's exposed to the air and semi-dries, and the consistency at the end of this process is not unlike chewed gum spit out on the sidewalk and allowed to sit in the sun, or if you have kids, a wet piece of fruit rollup spit out and ground into the upholstery of anything. This a) happens without exception, and b) makes the box smell worse than any plain litterbox ever would or even could, no matter how woefully neglected.

We had our self-scooping box in a bathroom, and after 1 week that room smelled like a straight-up barn. We've never been able to fully remove the smell, even 2 years after removing the fuckbox. The barn smell was actually absorbed into the wall and the wood of the cabinets near where the box was placed. That is how strong this odor was, and we only kept the fucking thing for a month. It took no time at all to produce a smell so heinous that my mom actually had to go live in another part of the house while we gave the thing its 30 day trial run.

Basically, all automated varieties of cat box ultimately require infinitely more maintenance than a plain, old-fashioned box full of litter plus scoop. Most of them will probably have some kind of expensive replacement component. With the self-flushing kind, I imagine that would be the plastic litter. With the self-scooping kind, it's a specially shaped plastic shit depository box that can't be bought anywhere but through the company and fills very, very quickly as it's about half the size of your average shoebox in width and same size in length. I wouldn't pay more for an automated box than for a regular one. In fact, you couldn't give me one for free.

[Ghost_Wheel22]

I managed to teach my cat to poop out in a far corner of my lawn. I can't imagine having a cat in some metro apartment though :/