The Litter Robot 4: Is it worth the money?

A few years back, I decided to invest some of the money I got from my bonus at work into into a better solution to manage our cat litter cleaning situation. With four cats in a small house, including two senior kitties, I needed a solution that would help keep the boxes clean on a more frequent basis. Let’s face it: cleaning the litter is not really an enjoyable part of cat ownership. However, it’s a requirement if you want to live with these fuzzy friends. I had been eyeing the Litter Robot 4 for a couple of years at this point in time. I had seen the ad on Facebook with Pam from The Office advertising the Robot, and I was desperate for a better solution to keep my house cleaner, so I decided to take the plunge. What I needed to understand, however, was – is the Litter Robot 4 worth the money?

The Litter Robot 4 was around $700. It came in a large box and was very easy to to unpack and set up. I downloaded the app, connected the robot to my Wi-Fi, filled it with litter, gave it a name (we called ours The Ploppinator), and waited patiently for the first cat to use the box. I was most worried about whether this expensive piece of equipment would actually be used by any of our cats. After a couple of days, our youngest cat popped in and gave it a try. I was so thrilled! He is the most skittish of all the four cats that we had at the time, so I was relieved that the enclosed top did not bother him (he traditionally does not use boxes with closed tops), but this did not seem bother him too much. Once finished, he jumped right out and avoided the steps altogether.

Fast forward about 3 years. What has changed?

Not for all cats

First, our most senior cat did not use the box at all. This did not come as a big surprise as she had some bad arthritis in her joints. The box was simply too high off the ground for her to comfortably access. We ended up purchasing an inexpensive senior cat box, which has lower edges, so she would be more easily able to get in and out.

So, that left our three male cats. Our youngest, Link, only about a year old at the time, used it on occasion but still preferred the open top boxes. Our middle age and senior boys are now the most frequent users of the Litter Robot. They do still use our senior box and an additional, smaller box, so unfortunately, the Litter Robot has not helped us cut down on the number of boxes as I hoped it would. Link is the most finicky about where he does his business, and when we only had the senior box and the Litter Robot, he would find places around the house to do his business. Once I added the third box, he was using it regularly, but seemed to give up on the Litter Robot, for the most part.

Cleanliness Issues

The Robot has a drawer system where you are meant to use plastic bags that must be thrown away once the drawer is full. The nice thing about the app is that it will send you notifications when the drawer is full, and when there is movement detected in the drawer. Why, you might ask, would there be movement in the drawer of a Litter Robot? Let me tell you.

No matter how often you change the bags out, cat excrement tends to attract little flies. These flies will breed in the small crevices of the robot, inside the drawer and bag, and cause the robot to send constant push notifications about movement in your drawer. We took the entire robot apart to deep clean it from top to bottom, unscrewing the entire unit and putting it back together after sanitizing it and ensuring that it was perfectly clean for use again. After having done this once, we still had the fly problem come back. We keep the other boxes clean as best we can and throw away the bags of litter when they are full. I still am not thrilled about plastic bags as they cause more waste, and I would rather switch to a flushable litter, but we have had issues with flushable litter brands in the past and have not yet found one that works for us.

Benefits

The Litter Robot does have a decent camera sensor, and the 3-minute timer works well to prevent any accidental movement after the cat is done with their business. The laser sensor can get dirty, however, which means that if the sensor is off in any way, your Robot might be cycling itself without necessity. This has happened to us a couple of times. You must clean the laser sensor in order to prevent this from recurring.

Because you still have to be mindful of taking the full waste bags out to the trash on a regular basis, you are only saving a little bit of time if you have multiple cats. Not all of them will necessarily want to use the litter robot, which means you still have to manually clean your non-robot boxes if you have any picky cats. This factor alone may not make the Litter Robot worth the price.

Summary/findings

If you only had one or two cats, and they were not skittish and adapted well to new things, the Litter Robot 4 might be worth the money. However, if you have a senior cat or multiple cats, be prepared to still be doing a lot of cleaning and additional litter scooping with non-robot boxes as not all of your cats will take well to this new device.