Cat Boxes

The box has reuseable plastic granules in it. The urine seeps down to a lower level and away from the cat, where it will be swept out during the cleaning process. During the clean, a scoop goes through the granules as the bowl rotates and it scoops up the poo and tosses it back into a grinder area. Once all the poo is out, the box grinds that up, releases the disinfecting fluid, and flushes the shredded poo and urine away. The box then dries the beads to make iti ready for the next customer.

Its only drawback is a rather major one for the 20 minutes it takes to clean: Grinding up cat shit stinks. For that reason, I generally set the box to clean once a day in the middle of the night. If you have a long haired cat, you may also face toting this revolting thing out into the yard and detangling the grinder with gloves you’ll throw away immediately. While that is not a pretty task, I find it preferable to face that once every year than to have to clean the box once a week.

You buy granules once and not again until you’ve forgotten when you last bought them, so there is no litter to buy or to carry.  What you do buy recurrently is the disinfecting cleaner that you flush through the bowl weekly.  The box looks like a cat box so even very picky cats will use it.  It seldom smells (unless it is flushing), and you can set it to flush after every use or on a schedule that suits you.  It is priced about $500, is something you can set up, and costs little to maintain in both time and money.  Cats love it too.

The engineering change is a good one, but it also means you have disposable granules rather than the plastic ones which are washed, dried and reused.  My guess is that the encapsulated urine means the whole grinding process is encapsulatedf and the smell is contained in this unit when it grinds and flushes.  Honestly, if I were buying, I think I’d try this one.  I love not having to buy granules and sanitizing fluid, but, whoof what a stink.

The globe is large enough for good sized cats, though big cats and cats with long hair will still get box-smelly from rubbing on the ceiling when the litter is full.  That means keeping it clean is critical.  The doorway is huge, also for bigger cats and they do send a removable panel for the bottom of the opening to stop the litter-throwers from doing their worst.  It is low enough for cats to easily jump.  The waste drawer is big enough that you aren’t always emptying it and they do have liners – but you don’t have to use them. .  It is quiet and stays odorless as long as you use the odor filters in the waste area. It is a tad pricey, but seems to be worth it.

This fabulous box for humans takes a while for cats to embrace.  That is because of the way the design keeps all the litter and smells out of  your way.  In the photo, you see a cat peering out of the unit.  He’s in a little hallway that has a mat and is blocked from view with a (removeable) curtain.  Walking from outside into the little hallway, the cat takes a left turn into the box itself.  The big bonus there is that it’s a large litter pan and there is no ceiling on the drum, so your cat does not rub on old ick.  If your cat is claustrophobic, you can open the top of the unit and let the cat see daylight as he goes about his routine.

It uses crystals, which do not clump and yet manage to absorb the liquid from a normal cat.  The unit rakes through the crystals after the cat has gotten out and pushes the poo into a little recess conveniently hidden under that front cover area.   The crystals are more expensive than clumping litter, but they are also a hell of a lot prettier and last without become unuseable: They simply don’t absorb when they get too old.  You’ll use a sack of crystals a week for multiple cats (using two units) but with a single cat that still concentrates his urine, I’d expect the crystals to last two weeks or maybe even more.  There’s a deodorizer pad you can put near the poo collection, but I found even without it, this unit didn’t smell much.  I do not recall whether this box ran on a hard switch or a soft – it may well have been a soft switch.  That said, because it didn’t clump, the worst that happened was turds started to pile up and the crystals in the middle got saturated before the ones on the edge.

I invested in a second tray so that I could wash one tray and use the other.  Two of these would easily have handled all three of my cats if it hadn’t been for Pee Man.  In case you’re now curious, an 18 year old cat can kill a sack of crystals in two days.  That’s why he uses the winner of the Old School Box now.