When I first heard about the LitterMaid Electronic Litter Box, I thought, “Great. Finally, I don’t have to manipulate my roommate into scooping the cat poop anymore.” And I was right. At least for a week. Then, the damn thing broke. So, I bought another one. That one broke, too. I started thinking the cats were sabotaging the LitterMaid, so I watched them every time they went near the box. Boy, those were some fun Friday nights. The cats weren’t doing anything wrong, yet the LitterMaid broke again. After three tries and hundreds of dollars wasted, I gave up. This article will hopefully save you the time and money I’ll never get back. Here are eight reasons not to buy a LitterMaid Electronic Litter Box.
1. The LitterMaid Electronic Litter Box sounds like a bad garage rock band is playing in your living room. It’s so noisy, I had trouble working from home. I couldn’t enjoy television. I couldn’t curl up with a good paperback. I nearly stopped feeding the cats, so that they would poop less and allow me some peace and quiet. I mean when this thing gets revving, it is loud.
2. It’s pretty damn expensive. The LitterMaid Basic Self-Cleaning Litter Box sells for $109.99 retail. The LitterMaid Elite Mega retails for $199.99. And the cost doesn’t end there, not by a long shot. Additional waste receptacles cost $17, carbon filters cost $11, a cat paw cleaning ramp retails for $21, a litter box carpet for $22. The cat privacy tent is a whopping $40. And we haven’t even gotten to their special cat litter! And, to be quite frank, if the LitterMaid Litter Box actually worked, it might just be worth the costs. But it doesn’t!
3. If your LitterMaid works for a week, consider yourself lucky. The geniuses who engineered this thing must have designed it as a science project, which they would only need to work for one night so they could take home their blue ribbon and then dump their invention in the trash. The internet is full of complaints about the LitterMaid malfunctioning soon after folks get it home. On each of my LitterMaid Litter Boxes, the rake stopped moving within days, maybe weeks. Once that happens, you are left with a two hundred dollar plain old box that smells like crap, and you find yourself standing over it with a pooper scooper and not enough money left to drink and forget.
4. Customer service is meaner than hell, and calling them won’t do you a lick of good. I’m a lawyer, and I’ve dealt with all kinds of companies regarding clients’ complaints of defective products. But I’ve never had an experience like I had with LitterMaid. There is just nothing nice to say about them. They are unhelpful, impolite, and not very bright. Their way of “making good” was by offering me a small discount on my fourth machine. Suffice it to say, I declined.
5. Even when it works, the mechanical rake becomes so caked with cat poop, you’ll rethink having pets. Not only is cleaning a rake caked with poop more disgusting than scooping the poop out of the litter box, it’s more time-consuming and, I’m sure, more unhealthy. You’ll long for the glorious old days of manual scooping.
6. Aside from its terrible mechanics, the LitterMaid suffers other serious design flaws. The box is not deep enough to hold enough litter to prevent cat waste from sticking to the floor of the box. The clumps of litter stick to the floor and cause the rake to continuously jam. This gets worse every time the rake gets moving.
7. The LitterMaid’s rake may mow down your cat. Often, the LitterMaid quits resetting the sensors, which are supposed to prevent the mechanical rake from operating when your cat is squatting in the box. When the sensors fail to reset, the rake can operate while your cat is still doing his business inside the box. My cats had to high-tail it out of the box on more than one occasion.
8. You may burn to death. Okay, so I structured that sentence for shock value, but I’m not kidding. I’ve heard of at least two instances where the LitterMaid Electronic Litter Box caused fires. One occurred recently in Union, New Jersey.
The LitterMaid Electronic Litter Box is a terrible product from a terrible company. Before going out to spend hundreds of dollars, thinking you’ll never have to scoop poop again, do your research. You’ll find that you might as well just flush that money down the toilet. Or better yet, you might as well just bury the money under your cat’s litter in a well-designed conventional box.
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Here’s where not to order one of these terrible machines: www.littermaid.com
