Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

## Parts ### Unit This is an ELSPET unit. I’ve seen them around on Amazon for around a thousand bucks somehow? Don’t pay that, you should be able to score this thing for less than $500. It’s pretty well built, I’ve even yanked the sides off it to see what was going on inside and everything is wired up really well and there are plenty of fasteners to keep thing thing held together for a very long time. The only real wear you’re likely to find is on the rake as it’s going to be coming in contact with horrible things every single day so take care of that part and you should be good here. ### Power DC wall adapter that runs 12v at 4 amps ~50 watts max. Standby power is around 4 watts so not too terrible. It’ll vary when it is running UV LEDs or actively scooping with the motor. Since the AC conversion happens externally, you could very easily wire this thing up to a battery or a solar panel or what have you, I like flexibility. I imagine a single motor would be capable of raking waste out of the litter, they’re pretty strong, but this has one motor on each side so it’s very strong, don’t put your hand in the way of that rake or it’s gonna get you! I have 3 cats that have been running in and out of it acting like it’s a toy from the start and it only ever had one close call. One cat shoved her way through the door just as it was closing and it immediately opened the door back up and halted everything. I’m confident with the safety of this machine. ### Rake Replacement rake comes in the box just in case anything goes wrong with it. It has a lot of fine teeth to get the smallest clumps from the litter and they’re going up against some pretty hefty competition sometimes. You may end up breaking something during your trial and error stage so this will get you back up and running quickly. ### Accessories In the back you’ll have tray to catch waste, a super tiny brush and little spoon as well as a little plastic manual scooper. Now at first I was thinking “what am I going to do with this tiny little spoon?” until I realized, sometimes the vet asks for a stool sample and this would make that much more sanitary than trying to scoop it up with the container or worse, my hand? ### Liners This thing uses liners. I was totally against this at first as it’s an expendable part that’s going to need to be refilled forever. But technically you don’t need to use these if you want to clean out the removable tray in the back all the time. I would suggest using these though and by the shape of it you can easily just use grocery bags or find other bags locally that you can put in here as liners. They give you two rolls so you’ll be good for a while until you make that decision to refill or change. ## Assembly Super easy, just pull the bottom out towards you, shove the two foam seals in either side on the inside and all done. Difficult part is if you add too much or too little litter. Too little and you’re going to either have a nasty sticky mess in the bottom or you’ll at least be adding more litter often. Too much and the motors will bog down. You’ll hear them and then the LED will turn red and it’ll beep, then it will try again a few times. You’ll get used to the amount to use through trial and error. The reason for the rake trying multiple times I believe is that when you initially fill the basin you’ll normally end up with a litter piling in the middle. Upon retrying to rake the litter it will spread it out more each try until it has a more consistent floor. This is great too because then the cat has a much larger surface area to do their business on. ## Litter Selection Worry about clumping and size of granules. If your litter often breaks up into many little tiny clumps, they’re going to go through the rake teeth and you’re going to have a bad time. I’ve been using Arm & Hammer: Clump and Seal litter. It’s pretty much straight up sand with some deodorizer beads in it. The side effect of this litter is when the UV lights turn on, the deodorizer beads will glow like you’re looking at the surface of the moon, very neat compliment to this space ship looking unit. The drawback of this litter is that it’ll end up collecting a clay like substance in the bottom of the basin below the litter. This just tells me from time to time to go blast it with some high pressure water to clean it all off. ## Cleaning Push the little tabs on either side of the top of the front step and yank that off. Two things here. First off the grill on the top of the step is not fastened down by anything, it can pop off and get out of alignment. This is so you can just pull it off and dump any collected litter into the basin. When it’s assembled it doesn’t go anywhere from what I’ve tested. Next remove the two foam sealers on either side inside the litter box. This is the worst part, I imagine they could have come up with a better mechanism here to deflect litter from escaping the globe housing. Just wear gloves through all of this I would suggest. Once the foam seals are removed you can grab the handle on the front behind the step that you previously yanked off, lift it up a little bit or wiggle it around while pulling it out and the whole bottom basin of the litter box will come out allowing you to dump it, clean it, refill it, whatever. You can still use the front opening to top off litter if you don’t want to go through all of this every time. You’re a human I’m sure, capable of critical thought. ## Controls Pretty simple. One one side you have a clock. You’re likely not going to have access to both sides of this thing as it’s really large unless you have it set up in the middle of your living room like the images in the product description show?! The clock side of mine points at the wall and I have no idea why I even set it. I don’t think it does anything except maybe auto-sleep mode to not run while you’re asleep. Ok, other side, 4 buttons, left to right - Power / Shovel: Hold this thing to turn it off, it should close the door so no cats will be collecting a mountain of waste in there while it’s off, we know that wouldn’t be a good idea. Press it once and it’ll do its normal cleaning thing. - Sleep Mode: Will tell the machine to quit machining. Really this thing is so quiet, in the bathroom next to my bedroom with the door open, I can barely hear it running. I’m very impressed with the noise. - Lamp Circle: This will kill the night light. Normally the light is blue and can be a bit disorienting or annoying as it’s very bright. I’ve been using it as a night light so I don’t need to turn on the lights in the bathroom in the middle of the night. - Delay: No idea, the manual states that when this is on and the light is illuminated that it’ll wait 20 minutes for clumping instead of 10. And if you press it again it’ll enter cleaning mode. Don’t listen to this. I tried all sorts of combinations of holding this button, pressing it, holding this button with the Shovel button and it always did the normal Shovel process for me. When you want to remove the rake, just push the shovel button, wait until it reaches the very top and just remove the power cord right below the buttons. Bam, it’s not going anywhere, otherwise if you don’t do this right you may end up getting your hand pinched by the rake when it tries to return while you’re trying to remove it. ## Lights Finally, the easiest part! I see it this way - Blue: Sleeping - Blue Flashing: Sterilizing with UV lights - Green: Cat just got out, it’s waiting for clumping - Green Flashing: Door is closing and cleaning has begun! - Red: Shove the front stair back in, it must have come out somehow - Red Flashing Slowly: Motors just can’t keep up, either clean the bottom of the basin or you have too much litter in this sucker. - Red Flashing Fast: I don’t know, something had to go pretty bad. I haven’t seen this state and when getting frustrated with this thing trying to figure it out, I’ve kicked it across the bathroom and it’s always seemed to run normally for me. ## Issues ### Protective Film I’m not sure what they were expecting with this. It’s great at the start to keep the litter from sticking to the higher up areas of the basin where the rake drags but this will get clawed off by the cats in no time. After it’s clawed off however it seems to be OK anyways. ### Front Stair The front stair is a good idea and catches a lot of litter, but it’s so short depth-wise that my cats tend to climb it to get in, but jump over it to get out so it’s more like an obstacle for them in that sense. It’ll still catch littler as they jump over it though so I’m happy for that but you're just not going to keep litter off your floor, get one of those little litter catching mats to further reduce it further if you have the room. ### Reading Max / Min In the basin is some faint text that shows min and max litter amounts. In the perfect world you would remove the basin, add some littler, shake the basin back and forth to flatten the litter out, match it to the middle of the min / max text and have the perfect setup. But good luck with that, I don’t think I’ll be able to even read it for that much longer. They should have embossed or done something other than silk screened that text on there to make it more legible. ### Cat litter buildup on the bottom This is bound to happen with certain litter types, you won’t know about it until it’s trying to destroy the fingers on your rake so keep an eye on that, it hasn’t damaged my rake yet but I’m pretty consistent about paying attention to those things. ### Grub screws stripping Biggest problem I had was that the rake arm lost its power. This was due to some bad threads where the motors attach to the arm. Figuring this out was not very easy as this thing is held together by a LOT of hardware. Check next section for details on that. ## Support Amazing! I was expecting some call center that supports a hundred other products for minimum dollar but I was wrong about that. They responded quickly, concisely about my very specific issue and totally made it better in just a few days. I’m very confident that if you give these people a detailed message about your issue, you’re going to get a detailed solution to solve your problem. Their support address is in large text printed right on the cover of the manual, they aren't trying to hide from you. ## Random Technical Details This thing runs a Tuya platform therefore you hackers out there could technically dig into its Espressif device, I haven’t checked specifically but I’m going to guess at ESP8266 as it uses wifi for it’s connectivity instead of Bluetooth, then you could do some pretty fun ESP Home kinda stuff. Someone make a Home Assistant integration!