Litter Robot update

foms asked me how the litter robot is going, what maintenance it needs.

Well, after 18 months or so we have had some aggravations.

1. High peeing. Intermittently, Scotty has been peeing high enough to reach the screen and this makes a mess that is a hassle to clean. Currently, though, he is not doing this. When he doesn’t pee on the screen, it stays pretty clean for long periods of time. I hope he keeps on peeing in the right direction. One thing we think may help with this, is orienting the unit so that if Scotty wants to look at the door to the room, while peeing, he will aim his butt away from the screen. Because he is definitely a watcher.

2. Pinch detect sensor faults. When the litter robot cycles, the globe slowly turns upside down and the waste falls through a hole into the drawer below. Then it turns the globe back right side up, and the clean litter falls back into the bed for the cat’s next potty break. If, while the globe is upside down, the cat jumps back in, it is supposed to detect the cat’s weight and stop moving. And if this fails to work, and the cat sticks a body part into the hole, the pinch detect sensor is suppose to stop the globe turning. This pinch detect sensor keeps getting triggered, falsely. When this happens the globe gets stuck upside down and the cat has no access to his litter.

Scotty is SO good! When this happens he screams at us in a totally different tone of voice, until we check it. And he holds it in! He hasn’t had an accident yet but it’s been a near thing. Poor little guy is hopping around with his legs crossed while we fight with the stupid pinch sensor. It has happened enough times that I actually bought a camera so I can check it from my iPad a couple times a day, make sure the globe is right side up.

Anyways, the company says this is caused by dirt or corrosion on the sensor. Their website has instructions on how to clean the pinch detect sensor if you have this issue. We have cleaned it so many times but it keeps getting dirty and falsing again. So we recently did a different fix. We bypassed the dumb thing. Just jumpered the wires. So far so good. I still have the camera there just in case, but we have not had another incident since we bypassed the sensor.

Note, though, that this means we have now defeated one layer of the safety technology. If we had a kitten who was too small to trigger the weight sensor I would hesitate to defeat the pinch sensor. But since Scotty is full grown I feel ok with it.


When thing go well, the litter robot is great. When we have a rash of high peeing, or a bunch of pinch detect faults, we wonder if it’s worth it. On balance, though, I feel it lets us maintain higher standards of housekeeping even during periods when it doesn’t save much work. If it got fried by a power surge of something, I would replace it.