My Cats Won’t Poop Anywhere Except in the Whisker Litter-Robot 4 (Thank God)

After years of trepidation about getting pets, my wife and I finally capitulated to our feline-obsessed kids and took on two kittens last month. Having been clear of diapers for a good few years now, we were reluctant to be back in the poop-scooping business, so we wanted to find a viable option for taking care of that side of things. Find it we did, with Whisker’s Litter-Robot 4 — the futuristic cat poop-remover you never knew you needed.

The Unboxing

The Litter-Robot 4 comes in a very large cardboard box, but is pretty much fully assembled, making it a painless experience, once you’ve extracted it. Inside the box, you’ll find:

• The Litter-Robot 4.
• A carbon filter to help absorb smells.
• A few waste drawer liners.
• A quick-start guide.
• The power supply.

Whisker Litter-Robot 4

Visit Amazon $699.00 from Litter-Robot by Whisker

The Design

It’s an odd thing to say about a device designed solely for cats to evacuate their fishy little bowels in, but the Litter-Robot 4 is a really rather attractive contraption. It wouldn’t look out of place on the Starship Enterprise, and not necessarily even as a toilet — you could just as easily imagine Captain Kirk using it to travel through an intergalactic wormhole as relieve himself in (you can make the requisite “searching for Klingons on Uranus” joke here yourself).

Available in white or black, with multiple color options for the bezel (the ring around the entrance), its rounded shape and smooth surfaces mean it will be right at home in any vaguely modern-looking household, especially those already featuring a smattering of Apple-inspired tech.

Completing the Star Trek look is a row of five pleasingly chunky round buttons on the top of the device, accompanied by a light strip that flashes and changes color depending on the situation (colors range from yellow to purple, but sadly provide no opportunity to declare a “code brown”). These buttons are all clearly labeled and their functions intuitive, which is always appreciated in a device that unavoidably requires your occasional close proximity to fresh animal poo.

The Set-Up

Once the machine was safely placed in a corner of the room and plugged in, the set-up was pretty straightforward. It does require connecting it to your wi-fi, and then the app, which took a couple of attempts, but once that was figured out, it was plain sailing. You simply fill the base with a fine, clumping cat litter to the indicated line, make sure the waste-drawer/cat step has a liner inside it, and off you go.

The Experience

I fully expected to have to gradually acclimatize my kittens to this imposing sci-fi turd depository. I placed each one of them inside it shortly after arrival, one after the other, and sure enough, after a little sniff around, they jumped right out and continued exploring their new home. Within the hour, both had voluntarily re-entered the device and relieved themselves. We were helped immensely by the fact that their former home also had a self-emptying litter machine in a similar-ish style, but the fact is that one month in, neither kitten has had a single accident. Wherever they are in the house, they always make the pilgrimage to the Litter-Robot 4 when it’s time to go, which I have to assume is a pretty massive endorsement. 

Watching the machine at work is surprisingly hypnotic. The drum slowly turns, causing the dry, unused litter to fall easily through the sifting grid, which catches the larger clumps of litter containing your cat’s number ones and twos. As it continues to turn, these clumps fall through a hole into the waste drawer underneath. The drum then slowly reverses, pouring the unused litter back into the base. Along with the obvious advantage of never having to manually scoop any squishy surprises, it also saves you a lot in litter, since only tiny amounts are used on each visit. In fact, the app even makes a point of telling you how many scoops of litter you’ve saved by using the device (229 so far!)

None of this means you won’t ever encounter the eye-watering stink of a freshly laid cat egg, of course. The Litter-Robot 4 always pauses for a couple of minutes after the cat exits to begin its self-emptying cycle, to make sure the cat is well and truly gone. If you come within a few feet of it while that red light is lit, you will indeed be hit full in the nostrils with Beelzebub’s own date night cologne, which again, is why it’s so handy that the buttons are all so clearly labeled, since anything that you need the machine to do can be quickly inputted within the space of one urgently-held breath.

I’m also pleased to say that the safety features work very well. Any time one of my cats exercises their God-given right to near-fatal levels of curiosity, i.e., pounces head first into the machine as it revolves, the machine detects it, waits for them to exit, then waits a further two minutes before resuming the cycle. If you’re in the room and want the cycle to resume sooner after your cat’s exit, you can just hit the “cycle” button on top.

One nitpick I have is the associated app, which just doesn’t seem to do very much. It made a bit of a song and dance about entering my cats’ details (name, age, weight, breed, etc., etc.) during setup, but so far, it seems unable to distinguish between the two of them. Today, for example, it lists Alfredo Sauce (thanks, kids) as being 4.4 pounds, and Noodles (thanks again, kids) as being 2.9 pounds. I took them both to the vet last week and know that they both weigh almost five pounds exactly, so I’m not really sure what the point of this function is. The app does, at least, show you how full the waste drawer is, whether the litter level is low, and if the machine is in use, so you’ll have a pretty good idea of what needs doing and when, and whether or not your cats are actually using it.

The Maintenance

Upkeep is normally gratifyingly easy: Once the waste drawer is full (as noted by either the app or a flashing red light on top of the machine), you simply pull it out, remove the bag, tie it up, and either seal it in concrete and fire it into the Atlantic ocean, or drop it in the trash, whichever seems more appropriate. The drawer even lets you store a few spare bags underneath the one in use. Every now and again, one of the cats may track some poop around the inside of the device (one of mine made some fascinating daubs that looked eerily like the interior of the Chauvet Cave), but these wipe off easily with a damp cloth or piece of kitchen towel.

Now, I say “normally” above because there has been one mishap that was made far worse by a seemingly innocuous design flaw. Having been out all day, I didn’t see the red light flashing, and nor did I check the app. I got home to discover that the waste drawer was full, and as such, the machine couldn’t/wouldn’t cycle anymore. As a result, the machine was, of course, full of cat poop. (On a related note, the app initially gives you so many notifications that I completely missed the one saying it was full — it took me a while to figure out how to change this so it only tells me the important stuff).

But wait, it gets worse! As I was removing the bag from the waste drawer, the Litter-Robot took it upon itself to start its cycle, and before I knew what was happening, it had dumped a day’s worth of cat nastiness — and all the litter — into the drawer-less base of the machine. Which is annoying by itself (you would think it would be designed not to do this), but worse are the little indented areas in the base that you can see in the above photo (on top of the grey mat). These are very awkward to clean, especially since the poop gets stuck in the corners, and it made the clean-up a good deal longer and more gag-inducing than it needed to be.

Whisker Litter-Robot 4

Visit Amazon $699.00 from Litter-Robot by Whisker

The End Result

Those last points aside, I honestly couldn’t be happier with the Litter-Robot 4. The thought of twice-daily litter box scooping was a big part of our reluctance to get cats, and this has solved the problem almost entirely.

Whether you get this model or an earlier one is largely a matter of preference: The Litter-Robot 3 and Litter-Robot 3 Connect are both cheaper ($499 and $549, respectively), and both are still popular models. The Litter-Robot 3 lacks the online capability and associated notifications, and both have a smaller capacity and, apparently, a less well-sealed waste drawer, so again, it’s down to what you need from it. I received the Litter-Robot 4 as a press review sample, so the decision was made for me, but either way, I’m extremely glad I have it. Better still, 100% of cat buttholes in my household agree.