Best Cat Litter Boxes – Consumer Reports

If there’s room in your budget for a pricey self-cleaning litter box, we found this one totally worth it. A few minutes after a cat jumps in to do their business, the machine turns like a front-load washing machine (though slowly), sending litter through a grate for holding while clumps of litter are left to drop through a hole in the drum that leads to a waste drawer. It then turns back around to allow the unused litter to fall back through the grates to the bottom of the litter box. Clumping litter is recommended for the best results.

If the machine senses a cat’s weight on the step up to the box or inside the box, the unit pauses its turning as a safety measure. Chip is a curious kitty, and she frequently paused it midcycle.

Looks

This is a huge litter box, and I’m not just talking about its interior space. The Litter Robot 4 looks like a combination washing machine, spaceship, and time machine for small pets. This model didn’t fit in any of our preferred spaces, either because of its size or because it needs to be plugged in. Or in my case, both. It’s 22 inches wide and 27 inches deep. For comparison, my cats’ usual litter box fills a roughly 16-inch-wide space in the bathroom of my fairly small Brooklyn apartment.

Cat Reactions

After a couple of days of hesitation and experience with another self-cleaning model (the PetSafe Scoop Free), my cats got used to the idea of their litter box moving by itself. Twig, my geriatric cat, was much more hesitant about using this one, which requires a tall step up to enter. She did manage to hop up into it, but when given the option of using this one vs. a traditional litter box, she went the traditional route. Chip, in a few bursts of energy, created what I feared would become a cat litter tornado inside it, but she ultimately accepted it as a place to do her business.

Teddy and Spud were hesitant as well. “They were a bit intimidated by this box for a day or two, but after feeling safe around it, there were no issues,” Arianna says. The step has a grippy texture and can catch litter, so there’s less tracking than there would otherwise be, they said.

Human Experience

Arianna, Karla, and I agreed that this was the best of the bunch, even though two of us had to switch to a different litter for the best results. There was little cleaning involved (more on that below), but it was generally a set-it-and-forget-it model between litter changes. You plug it in and pour litter up to the indicator line.

I tried this model with three types of litter: our usual PetSafe Scoop Free Crystal Cat Litter, Whisker’s proprietary clumping Great Litter, and the Dr. Elsey’s Ultra Unscented Clumping Clay Cat Litter that Arianna uses. According to the Litter Robot owner’s manual, only certain types of litter are compatible with this box. Thankfully, my crystal litter, a type of absorbent litter that neutralizes odors, worked out, even though it’s nonclumping and even though the manufacturer says that it may affect the litter level and “drawer full” indicator accuracy.

The main difference between Whisker’s Great Litter and the Dr. Elsey’s litter was the size of grains. The Whisker litter had small grains, which created less noise than the larger Dr. Elsey’s grains. I could hardly hear the machine cycling using the Great Litter. But in my household, the noise level difference didn’t have much of an impact on our daily lives.

The Litter Robot works with the Whisker app, which allows you to monitor the number of times your cat visits the litter box and the cat’s weight, and you can set up app notifications every time a cleaning cycle is completed and when the waste drawer needs to be emptied. All three of us were fascinated by the weight readings, which can be shown in a line graph over time in the Whisker app. Being someone who uses a Fitbit to track sleep myself, I loved looking at the chart and coming up with theories as to why my cats’ weights went up and down. This feature might be more useful for someone whose cat is overweight.