A few years ago I had to leave the city on short notice. It was urgent, the kind of trip you cannot plan around. I had two cats then and a plain manual litter box, and I came home to exactly what you would expect.
That trip changed how I thought about litter. I stopped treating it as a chore I would eventually get to, and started treating it as a system that had to run whether I was standing over it or not.
That is how I ended up living with a self-cleaning litter box for the last five years. First with two cats, now with three: Mao, Leo, and Deo.
I work from home, so I have watched this machine run through thousands of cycles, most of them at close range. I have cleaned it when it was easy and when it was not. I have paid for the parts nobody warns you about.
This is the account I wish I had found before buying. Not the spec sheet. The lived-in version: what holds up, what wears out, what a multi-cat home does to the math, and who should honestly skip the whole category.
Read the full post: Self-Cleaning Litter Box for Multiple Cats: What Five Years in a Three-Cat Home Taught Me
