so yeah i bought a $600 cat toilet. this christmas pretty much sucked for reasons I can't identify, but a lot of people On Line seem to have had the same experience. it just didn't feel very christmasy and I couldn't think of anything to get for anyone, except the cats, who, god bless them, are Having Trouble
the New Cats are very longhaired, including their asses. we need to get them "sanitary trims" because they're having trouble cleaning themselves, but it turns out that all the groomers are booked up for months so this has been impossible, and additionally, we have found that they hate the vibration from electric clippers to the point where I'm sure they will have full psychobilly freakouts when we do manage to get them groomed, so i suspect this will be a deeply traumatic yearly process with no solution
for the moment i'm just trying to mitigate, and christ, it's tough. they don't bury reliably, for some reason. never had this problem with cats until these two. so basically, the litter box is constantly messy, and they're sitting on old lumps every time they get in there, making the problem worse
i wish i, or anyone in my house, had it together enough mentally to scoop the box every two hours religiously but we just don't, we're all too sad and tired to keep up with three cats as it turns out, and even if we were doing our best all day, the night could still be a problem.
so the cats got the only present this year. it was such an egregious expense, i would never have bought an automatic litter box in my life, they're notoriously unreliable and the fundamental principles are unsound and they're just such an asinine expenditure, but i just didn't know what else to do. the only way I can think of to keep these cats from being constantly covered in their own filth is to somehow keep the box continuously scooped, and i can't see another way to achieve that.
every other design i've seen for this kind of thing is just a bad idea. like, a rake that goes through the box - that's never going to work reliably unless your cat has Perfect Poop.
but i had purchased, some years ago, a "semi-automatic" box. it's a normal enclosed litter box, but it has a half-circle shape on one end so you can roll it onto its top. all the litter slides into a bin through a grating, and the lumps get strained out and fall onto the "ceiling", then when you roll it back, they drop into a bin, while the litter slides back through the grating and refills the box
this is so much closer to a solution than anything i'd ever seen before. i'd tried a few double-bin sifting systems and they were... not really the answer. this actually worked remarkably well, until something stuck to the bottom, and then it all went to hell since there was no way to get it loose. it was also really poorly built, so the grating kept popping loose and dumping all the litter into the catch bin, and i just didn't have the room to operate it, it required literally 5' of clear floor space. haha, as if. i eventually had to give up and just use it as a normal box.
this new machine is simply a mechanized version of that same principle. it's essentially a front-loading washing machine that your cat shits in, and then it rotates, the litter falls through a grate into a bin, then it completes the rotation and the clumps fall into a drawer in the bottom. it then rotates back, and all the litter slides out of the bin and back into the basin.
honestly, i think it's overkill - i don't need any of the machinery. what makes this special compared to what I had is that A) it's built better and B) it's a suspended drum, so it doesn't need extra floor space to operate. if they had simply sold me a manual version of this for $250 I think it would have solved the problem - I could give it a crank every time i walked through the basement, no problemo. but, they didn't, so i had to shell out this obscene amount of money on a wifi bluetooth app sensor scale monstrosity that cheerfully tells me how much my cat weighs every time they take a dump.
there IS one unique element, which i think is the lynchpin of the whole design, in more ways than one. i wondered how they solved the problem of litter sticking to the bottom of the drum - especially since the motor in this thing rotates so slowly and gently, what would break the clumps loose? well, their solution to that is... kind of wild
the pan is lined with a rubber sheet, and that sheet has a weight attached. when the drum rotates, the weight flops down and inverts the sheet, breaking everything loose from the bottom. this is a brilliant solution and I can't think of any better approach, it seems unassailable. unfortunately, it has a big problem: it's rubber.
more accurately I think it's some PVC formulation. people on the subreddit argue about whether the company has switched to a compromised elastomer alloy; I couldn't busy myself worrying about that so i just ordered one and crossed my fingers that it survives long enough to justify the expense, but it's entirely possible that it will simply disintegrate, or that the cats will decide to claw through it. both problems have been reported.
i am hoping this godforsaken contraption works out. if it does, then it'll be something I'd recommend for anyone who has more cat than they have energy, but it sucks that the price puts it out of reach for an awful lot of people who could most use it.
