A little over 2 and half years ago I put in an order for a Litter Robot 4, for the total amount of around $1,000 CAD! The LR4 just got released in Canada, and I hopped onto the (very expensive) train for our single cat home.
The previous generation (LR3) is something I heard about at the time, but I also saw it as a very unattractive appliance. It sounded loud in videos, and I found constant complaints about it online (people complain about the LR4 a lot too—more on that later).
Here I will dump some interesting information about the robot, hopefully stuff that is useful and not the same old information you hear from your Youtube reviewer or an AI generated blog post.
Benefits and stats
Cost per use
As of this writing, the app says I have 3700 Scoops Saved. Now this doesn't take into account all the countless false triggers, cleanings, and other mishaps, but it's still an impressive number.
Rounding down pessimistically to 3000, I have paid about $0.33 per cleaning, a number that will hopefully continue going down!
Reduced litter costs
The LR4 is also very good at maintaining litter quality which means less $ spent on litter. Since it removes waste shortly after our cat has used it and we mix in fresh litter, it never feels like we need to fully throw out the batch of sand in the robot (barring a few exceptions).
Reduced sitter/visitor costs
The Robot allowed us to take small weekend trips (think 1-3 days) without worrying about our kitty back home too much. This required some additional tech: a water fountain, cameras, automated food dispenser.
When we didn't need to have someone do "chores" around feeding and cleaning, it meant we could have someone drop by just to spend some time with our cat. This meant we could often just ask friends and they would be happy to do it for free (thanks Mau! ❤️)
Trends in cats health (weight & litter box usage)
The LR4 does a good job of keeping track of our cat's weight and how often they use the litter box. Paired with a camera you have a really good historical insight into your cat's health.
The app doesn't do the best job of longterm tracking, but you will definitely notice it when your cat uses it less or more on a weekly basis. We noticed when we first got the robot, our cat used it around 2-3 times a day, and that increased to 3-7 times a day in present time.
In terms of weight, at one point I had to ask Whisker for long-term data, and they were happy to provide it. We could see that our cats weight has slowly gone down from 14lb to 10lb.
More on this later...
Benefits beyond numbers
Perhaps the biggest and most obvious benefit was that nobody had to go down to the basement to scoop the litter box. It's a small chore to do, but within a list of countless other chores we do day-to-day, it just made things easier and we had less arguments about it.
Things to know before you buy
The LR4 generates a lot of complaints online (particularly on Reddit), and to be honest a lot of it is just user error. People misunderstand how to maintain the robot, how to calibrate it, and so on.
A lot of it is solvable just by following the troubleshooting guides. That being said, it's not a perfect machine. It has some faults and I'm going to highlight some things you should know before investing in this machine.
Messes
With this robot, you're really betting on whether or not your cat uses it properly. It's very hard to predict how it will go. Whisker has a good guide on how to get your cat acclimated to using the new litter box, but even so we still had the occasional things go wrong.
For our cat, every now and then he will go into a period where he doesn't turn around when entering the robot. This means that when he pees or poops, it just goes outside the robot. With poops it's one thing, but with pee it's a very big mess to clean up. There's some mystical gaps in the plastic of the robot where the pee can leak down, and pool in areas you can't see without taking it apart a bit.
The solution was 1) finding the best fence for our cat, and 2) adding a pee pad to cover a gap under the Robot. This prevents majority of the messes and if they do happen, they are easy to clean up.
Cleaning
In some sense the robot is self-cleaning, but it will get grimy and nasty.
I usually do a deep cleaning at least once a year. This means taking it apart (no tools required), going outside on the driveway, hosing it down and scrubbing it with a big brush and some dish soap. This requires some gloves and a warm sunny day, because air-drying can take a while without. It's not terrible task, but it's something you have to do.
Now in-between these deep cleanings, there's a few different takes online on how to approach it. I settled on using wipes every now and then to wipe the liner inside (gloves still required). I simply buy regular hypoallergenic cat wipes (like the ones you use on your cat's fur). They have a good "scrubbing" texture, don't have harsh chemicals, and are much cheaper than litter box designated cleaning wipes.
Warranty
The LR4 comes with a standard warranty, but I opted to purchase additional warranty before the 1 year expired.
We've had quite a few things we had to replace:
- A new fence you saw in the photo above (our LR4 was shipped with what looked like a "work in progress" design that did not do much)
- New seal strips for the waste port (they get grimy and lose their adhesiveness)
- New globe (ours started to make a very loud rubbing sound when the motor was operating)
- New motor assembly
That's quite a long list... Thankfully all of these can be purchased pretty easily without warranty (at pretty fair prices), and everything has been easy to replace. But I think purchasing that warranty gives you a piece of mind.
Sad news about our kitty
I mentioned earlier that our cat lost weight and started to use the robot more often. This prompted us to take him to a vet and do a few tests, which revealed that our kitty had early stage kidney disease.
Thankfully he's doing fine today, but one of the things with this disease is cats will drink and urinate a lot more. Our kitty started to use the robot quite often, to the point where the litter level inside the robot would go down quite fast and made it hard to keep up.
The inspiration to create
This prompted us to purchase the Litter Hopper, which really helped. Our kitty continues to have a fresh clean litter box every single time goes in no matter how many times he uses it.
The hopper has a limited capacity though, and this inspired me to design a simple but handy extension attachment that makes refilling the hopper less frequent. It took quite a few iterations and tests to get it perfectly right and I used it for a month myself before deciding that other people could benefit from this. If you're interested, I am selling it right here: LitterHopper Capacity Extension Attachment
Disclaimer: I have no affiliation or any type of relationship with the manufacturer of the Litter Robot and the LitterHopper. This is a third-party aftermarket accessory.
Hope this has been helpful!