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Originally I was going to review this as an entry in my Cat Supplies series, but I decided that this piece of equipment deserves its own post. Mainly because the Whisker Litter Robot 4 is an investment at $699 retail price. Is it worth it? Let’s investigate.
Getting Started
The Whisker Litter Robot 4 claims that you’ll never have to scoop poop again! It is a somewhat large machine that arrives in one piece in a gigantic box. Setup is fairly easy, you put it in a spot where you want the litter box, you plug it in and you follow some instructions to pair the device with the app on your phone. For us, that means shoving it in our unused basement bathroom.
Because our cat Benny is fairly low maintenance, all we had to do was put some new litter in the robot, and he climbed right in and used it. Literally, we had barely left the bathroom before he christened it. Which meant we got to quickly see the clean cycle (which is fun to watch, honestly). The clean cycle essentially rotates the litter container, trapping the large clumps behind a screen while letting the clean litter fall through a grate. The clumps eventually fall into the litter tray below, and the container rotates in the opposite direction, allowing the clean litter to pool back into the bottom.
The Highlights
It largely works as expected
For a self-cleaning litter box, it does clean the litter. It succeeds at reducing the litter smell and we did see a reduction in litter outside of the box once switching over. Whisker advertises multi-cat features, but I can’t vouch for those as we only have a single cat. But, overall it works. Every two weeks or so I replace the bag in the litter tray and besides for a few things noted below, the poop ends up less stinky and where it should be.
Easy to track litter box usage
There’s a variety of notifications you can customize on the Whisker app. I have ended up tailoring this to a push notification every time the clean cycle goes off. I think the default also has “cat detected” notifications, these went off multiple times per clean cycle. I’m assuming because Benny is such a scamp that he just jumps in and out of the fun spinning thing – I definitely turned that off to reduce notification spam.
The app gives you a graph of how often the box has been used, which is useful for keeping track of Benny’s overall health. He averages out to about 3 uses per day, and if I were to notice a change, it might be an indicator of something that needs to be checked out by a vet. It is nice to have a central location for those statistics that I don’t have to manually keep track of.
The Problems
The weight has never worked
Benny is a small cat, coming in at around 9lbs. The weight tracking in the app has literally never gotten close, oftentimes saying that he’s between two and three pounds. It just flat out doesn’t work. It doesn’t affect the robot’s poop scooping performance, but for a feature that’s advertised prominently, it would be nice if it functioned.
The tray full sensor has issues
There’s a sensor that indicates how full the poop storage tray is. This sensor seems flaky, often jumping between percents daily – going from 40% full to 50% back to 40%, etc. It also doesn’t seem to reset properly after replacing the litter tray bag. This resulted in a disastrous few days, where I replaced the bag because I got a push notification that the tray was 100% full, but apparently the sensor didn’t reset. Also apparently, the robot will not cycle if the tray is reporting 100% full, so when I checked in on the basement bathroom several days later I found several days worth of poop remaining in the main container. Ew!
It wasn’t the end of the world, as performing a manual clean cycle easily solved the poopmageddon. But it did make me feel like an awful cat mom to see that much waste in the litter box. So pro tip for others with the Whisker Litter Robot 4 – make sure that the tray sensor actually clears when it should.
Sometimes ya still gotta scrape some poop
Depending on Benny’s… aim, sometimes there’s little bits of poop streaked on the walls of the container. It’s not that big of a deal to just scrape it off, but this along with the above makes it so the Litter Robot 4 requires some oversight. It’s still less of a pain than scooping out the box every day, but between this and the tray full sensor it’s not quite as hands free as Whisker claims.
Verdict
It’s hard for me to recommend something at this price point that isn’t flawless. And the Whisker Litter Robot 4 definitely has its flaws. However, it has been nice to be able to automate the stinkiest part of owning a cat. I say that if you have room, you’re willing to keep an eye on it and your notifications, and you have some extra cash you could set on fire, then it’s worth it. If one of those isn’t true, I’d look for another scooping solution.
What do you think? What has been your experience with the Whisker Litter Robot 4? Is there another litter solution I should investigate? Leave me your tips in the comments!
