If your cat is an indoor cat as most cats in the USA are then you probably find the worst part of owning a cat is keeping the litter box clean. This problem never occurred when cats were allowed out to roam freely. Unlike dogs cats always bury their waste when they have access to the outside. By keeping them indoors we have made an extra burden for ourselves. If you haven’t done so yet it is time to buy yourself and your furry friend a self cleaning litter box.
Self cleaning litter boxes come in a variety of types ranging from around $30 to $300 and it isn’t easy to decide whether the more expensive ones will be a better purchase in the long run or whether the cheaper models will work equally well. The one shown here on the left is from Litter Robot and is one of the more expensive models. How can you tell if a much less expensive model like the Scoop Free Automatic Litter Box Kit would be a better option?
So, even though this is a slightly unsavory topic I thought it might be useful if I reviewed the various kinds of cat litter box.
I started with the LitterMaid Elite Mega Automatic Self-Cleaning Litter Box LM900MB
This self cleaning litter box averages only 2.5 stars in the customer reviews although that does mean that some are very happy with it and give it 5 stars while others hated it and gave it only 1 star. Rather too many gave it one star and this would put me off buying it. Lots of people said it broke down only lasting a very short time.
LitterMaid Elite Mega Automatic Self-Cleaning Litter Box
The customer feedback has been rather poor on all LitterMaid models with many complaints that they constantly break and that the waste is not properly disposed of on them. The Littermaid brand of automatic litter boxes used to be very good with many cat owners recommending them. Unfortunately the standard of design and materials seems to have slipped llately to the great disappointment of customers who were liked earlier models.
This Elite model was supposed to fix the problem but it doesn’t seem to have done. There are still many complaints that the thing broke down after a short while and was a waste of money.
Apart from the poor standard of materials the other problem seems to be that it is very noisy. Some cats find it terrifying in fact but there are others that find the whole grating grinding noise a good excuse for a game of attack! So if your cat is a scaredy cat it probably won’t want to use the LitterMaid but a bold and fearless feline will be thrilled.
Given all the negative feedback on this I think it really can’t be recommended. But you may still want to check it out and read some of the customer feedback yourself.
LitterMaid Self Cleaning Litterbox
More coming…