As the saying goes, cats make two things: baby cats, and cat poo. We have three feline friends, and while I haven’t seen any evidence of baby cats, I can certainly attest to the latter half of that statement. If you’re bored or offended by talk of the removal of feline waste products, don’t read this entry any further.
When my wife (GoddessJ) and I bought our house, she declared that she would take care of the front halves of our little (hel)lions, i.e. feeding them, and that I was in charge of their back halves. Since I wear the pants in this family, I said “yes, dear,” and started looking for an appropriately geeky solution.
Although I would dearly love a Litter Robot (the Rolls Royce of geeky cat-poo solutions — I mean, just look at it!), the company has gone out of their way to make it difficult for me to get one, and I’m not willing to spend the extra money it would require to overcome those difficulties. So we ended up with two other self-cleaning cat boxes.
The first was the Littermaid Mega. It’s fairly expensive, but it’s tough and reliable — it’s still going strong, many years later, and from what I hear the manufacturer has improved it since the model that we got (exchanging the tough plastic tines on the rake for even tougher and easier-to-clean stainless steel ones, for instance). Unfortunately, all the cat litters we could find were very heavy clay ones (more on this below), and the motor wasn’t strong enough to push the clumps through it and get them to the disposal container reliably. I would often go down to the basement to clean it, only to find the “I’ve got a problem” light flashing and the entire thing full of used litter that it hadn’t been able to dispose of. So I ended up scraping it out manually more often than not.
After one of our cats died (age and excessive weight, despite our best efforts), we adopted another. She took an instant dislike to the idea of going all the way to the basement to relieve herself, so we needed to get another box to put upstairs. I decided to try the Littersweep Ultra. It’s less than half the price, you can buy a cover for it (another of our cats likes to toss litter everywhere in search of just the right spot — before going in the same corner he always does — so that was important), and the different design looked like it might be able to handle the litter properly. It was successful… you could hear it’s motor laboring and straining, but it always got the job done, and I only had to scrape the bottom and sides every couple days when I changed the bag in it. It finally bit the dust a few months ago, after a couple years of reliable service, and a post-mortem showed that the internal plastic parts were just worn out from all of that effort.
We decided that we liked that model, and that it had done well in a difficult situation, so we bought another one. We were low on litter too, so I picked up a couple more boxes at the same time. Here’s where the trouble really started.
During all of this, I’d been using Purina’s “Maxx Scoop multi-cat formula,” despite the humorously off-putting picture on the box of two cats who look like Loony Tunes cartoon characters who have filled their cheeks with puke and are desperately looking for some place to let it out. I wasn’t real happy with it for more practical reasons as well (it dissolved and latched onto the sides and bottoms of the boxes when it got wet, instead of just clumping together, and it did little or nothing for the smell), but it was the best I’d found. But when I opened the new box of litter, I saw immediately that it wasn’t the same stuff as before. It was darker and heavier, and the gravel was much finer than before. I had reservations, but I put it into the new box and let it rip.
Two days later, the new box started making a strange grinding and clacking noise and stopped working. A post-mortem on that one showed that one of the internal plastic parts had just snapped — this is a tough plastic, it doesn’t snap without a lot of provocation. When I went to clean the box by hand, I discovered what might have provoked it: the new litter clumped onto the sides and bottom of the box like wet concrete, even harder and heavier than the earlier version of it had.
Since we didn’t know for sure whether it was the litter or a manufacturing problem, we took it back to PetSmart and explained the situation. They were very kind and gave us a new one. I had no intention of testing this one to destruction, so I picked up a new kind of litter that had just come out too, called Nature’s Miracle. To my surprise and delight, it lives up to it’s name.
A bag of this stuff is half the weight of a box of the Maxx Scoop stuff, but it seems to last just as long, maybe even longer. There’s no cloud of dust when I pour it into the boxes, like there was with every other litter I’d tried. It’s made of mostly corn cobs, rather than clay, so it’s safe to flush it down the toilet (no more bags of used litter that have to be taken to the outdoor trash immediately!). It clumps together when it gets wet, but barely sticks to the sides and bottoms of the litter boxes at all. It neutralizes most of the smell too… at best, it smells only of pine after being used, and at worst it occasionally smells somewhat like a clean horse barn. To top it off, neither of the self-cleaning boxes have to strain at all!
Heaven, thy name is a self-cleaning litter box that works. 🙂