Litter-Robot 4 review: A luxury toilet for your cat

We love our pets, but they can be messy. Cats, of course, are among the cleanest pets to have — they have instincts related to where they do their business and are typically easy to train to use a litter tray. But litter trays aren’t without their downsides — like the fact that you still have to clean them on a regular basis. The Litter-Robot 4 aims to solve that.

The Litter-Robot, in general, has been loved by cat-loves for some time now, and the appeal is easy to see. Scooping litter certainly isn’t the most pleasant way to start or end your day — but the Litter-Robot 4 does the scooping for you.

The device is also very expensive. At $699, it has to make a serious case for itself as a way to avoid dealing with cat litter as much as possible. How does it perform? I’ve been using the Litter-Robot 4 for a while now to find out.

Design

The first thing you’ll notice about the Litter-Robot 4 when you first start using it is its design and, perhaps more specifically, its size. The Litter-Robot 4 is much larger than a traditional litter tray, and that can make it a little hard to find a place to put it that’s out of the way. And that’s compounded by the fact that you’ll need to plug the Litter-Robot 4 in, unlike a traditional litter tray.

But once you find a good spot for the Litter-Robot 4, you might find that you quite like the look of it. It’s big, but as far as litter trays go, it’s not ugly. The device is available in either black or white, however you can choose from a range of bezel colors, which can help make it look more premium and fit better into your home decor. Our unit is just black.

Image source: Christian de Looper

The top two-thirds of the Litter-Robot 4 is a large bin, which is where the cat enters to do its business, and where you’ll put new litter. At the bottom can be found a step for the cat to get in, but more importantly, that step can be pulled out to empty the clumps of litter every few weeks. It’s not massive, but with one cat I found that it was large enough to only need to be emptied around every week and a half.

On the top of the Litter-Robot 4 are manual buttons that you can use as needed — though you may not use these buttons much once it’s all set up. The buttons allow you to turn on and off the Litter-Robot 4, run manual cycles, reset the device, and manage the Wi-Fi connection. It’s a simple setup, but you can also control all of these things with the app.

The Litter-Robot 4 can be mostly disassembled for deep cleaning, and it’s recommended you do so every three months or so. You’ll need to learn how to do this, but after the first few times, it’s not very complicated.

There are even two lights inside the Litter-Robot 4, which can be turned on only at certain times or kept on. You can control the brightness of the lights, but frankly, I just turned them off altogether. I don’t need to see inside a litter tray all the time.

Generally, while a little bulky, the Litter-Robot 4 looks decently nice. Having moved from a litter box with a flap, a flap on the Litter-Robot might have been nice, but it’s not a huge issue, considering the fact that any smells are filtered out of the main globe relatively quickly, as opposed to a traditional litter box.

Setup

Setting up the Litter-Robot 4 is relatively simple, at least when it comes to connecting it to the app and getting it ready to use. You’ll start by taking it out of the box and removing the packaging, after which you can plug it in, download the app, and connect the two.

While physically setting up the Litter-Robot 4 is very easy, getting your cat used to it may not be. If you’re a cat owner, you’ll know how skittish they can be, and getting them acquainted with the Litter-Robot 4 is a bit of a process.

When you first set up the Litter-Robot 4 and plug it in, it runs a cleaning cycle — and I recommend having your cat in a separate room when you do this. My cat was not in a different room when the first cycle ran, and after seeing it run, he wanted nothing to do with the Litter-Robot 4, so I had to keep his old litter box there in the meantime while he got more comfortable with it.

Image source: Christian de Looper

Getting him comfortable with the Litter-Robot 4 again was itself a process and one that took a week or so. To do so, it’s recommended that you keep the device off for a few days and manually scoop litter. Then, you can run a manual cycle with the cat and you both present, making sure to touch the Litter-Robot to show the cat that it’s nothing to be afraid of. You should only run manual cycles for at least a few days — something I did every morning. Then, after the cat seems comfortable around manual cycles, you can finally set the Litter-Robot to run manually. Yes, it’s a big process, but the end result is that you won’t have to scoop litter anymore.

The company has even released other accessories that make dealing with litter easier. Recently, it launched the new LitterHopper, which is a bin that attaches to the back of the Litter-Robot 4 and releases fresh litter into it as it cycles — so you don’t have to refill the robot as much, just the LitterHopper. I’ve been using it, and it works quite well — you’ll just have to remember yourself to refill the LitterHopper as needed.

Using the Litter-Robot 4

When the Litter-Robot 4 is all set up, there’s really not much you have to do to use it. The Litter-Robot will run automatically a few minutes after it detects that your cat has exited, essentially ensuring that your cat always has a clean litter. Dirty litter is dropped into the bin, which is contained in the step.

Image source: Christian de Looper

So what do you have to do? Apart from the three-month cleaning, you’ll need to empty the bin every few weeks, and refill the clean litter, at a similar rate. The Litter-Robot 4 has a line inside of it that shows you where to fill litter to, which makes things a little easier. And, it offers great odor control that more or less eliminates any smells that you could imagine might appear in a device that collects cat litter over a few weeks.

The Litter-Robot 4 is incredibly quiet when it’s running a cleaning cycle, and you might not notice it running at all. It also has sensors inside that stop the cleaning process if your cat re-enters halfway through a cycle — an important safety feature.

The app

You can use the Litter-Robot 4 with the Whisker app, which lets you manually control the device and monitor its status. The app really helps make things even easier. It can monitor how much waste is in the bin and alert you when it needs to be emptied, and monitor how much clean litter is in the globe, alerting you when you need to refill it. The Litter-Robot 4 also notifies you when it’s done with a cleaning cycle, but I turned these notifications off. You might want to leave them on if you want to keep a closer eye on your cat’s health, but you can still see a history of use even without getting actual push notifications. You’ll even get a weekly breakdown.

Image source: Christian de Looper

The Litter-Robot 4 has another advanced feature that can be viewed in the app — the ability to weigh your cat. It’ll weigh your cat every time your cat uses the Litter-Robot and can plot trends on a graph. This can be helpful for monitoring health issues. You can set up multiple cats in the app, and the robot should be smart enough to differentiate them based on their weight. However, I can imagine it might get confused if the weight of your two cats is very similar. I only tested the Litter-Robot 4 with one cat.

It’s mostly easy to navigate the Whisker app, but I do wish that some of the manual controls were a little easier to access, instead of hidden in a settings menu. It’s a minor complaint though, and you’ll get used to the layout of the app.

Conclusions

The Litter-Robot 4 makes owning a cat even easier than it generally already is. Scooping litter certainly isn’t that time-consuming, but it isn’t the most pleasant thing to do — and with the Litter-Robot 4, you can more or less avoid having to deal with litter at all. It’s certainly an expensive product and definitely a luxury rather than a must-have. But if you hate scooping litter, it might be worth buying.

The competition

There are some other automatic litter trays out there, but none are as well-loved as the Litter-Robot. Robotic litter trays from PetKit are also worth considering. However, the PetKit app isn’t as well-designed, and the device itself doesn’t look as premium.

Should I buy the Litter-Robot 4?

Yes, if you’re looking for a robotic litter tray, and don’t mind shelling out for a luxury gadget.