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  • Dan Fixes Coin-Opsifixcoinops@retro.social
    Sep 10, 2026, 1:01 AM

    Taking this thing apart to give it a scrub and WOW am I glad I didn't pay full price for this

    This is just, Amazingly badly designed

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Replies

  • Dan Fixes Coin-Opsifixcoinops@retro.social
    Sep 10, 2026, 1:18 AM

    Here's the thing about incredibly overpriced machines, if this were $200 then all the reviews would be like "You have to remove ten threaded-into-plastic screws to clean this thing and instead of sliding litter over the smoothest, most impermeable, most odor-rejecting plastic it's got a fucking RUBBER liner in it" and it'd be one-star across the board, but if you've just dropped FIVE HUNDRED AMERICAN DOLLARS on a litterbox you're 100% gonna talk yourself into believing that you've made a wise purchase

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  • Dan Fixes Coin-Opsifixcoinops@retro.social
    Sep 10, 2026, 2:02 AM

    This is a Litter Robot 3. Three fucking versions in, and it's got THIS MANY CREVICES

    How many crevices did version 1 have?!

    underside of litter robot globe showing how each tooth of the big cog that runs around it has a built in Filth Accumulator
    Litter Robot base showing all kinda knobblies for litter to get stuck in
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  • Dan Fixes Coin-Opsifixcoinops@retro.social
    Sep 10, 2026, 2:09 AM

    See this is what we've got now, Omega Paw rolling litterboxes, no alt-text 'cause I'll describe them right here. They are FOUR PARTS. They have NO CREVICES. They are made of VERY SMOOTH PLASTIC. You roll it 90 degrees to the right and all the clean litter goes through that sifting grate and into a chamber. You continue rolling another 90 degrees and the poop is on the inside of the roof, and the floor's facing you. Bang on the floor and anything sticky falls down onto the inside of the roof. Roll it back 180 degrees to the left and all the poop is now in the drawer, tilt it a little bit more and the clean litter comes back outta the sifting grate.

    I figured the Litter Robot would be This But Turns Itself and hoo boy would that be Much Much Better. I could buy literally ten of these rolly lads for the cost of one litter robot

    Image attached toot
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  • Dan Fixes Coin-Opsifixcoinops@retro.social
    Sep 10, 2026, 2:22 AM

    Figured someone would've had one of these all the way apart to give it a good scrub, saw a five minute video guide, turns out it's someone taking five minutes to explain that you can take the globe off the base and then take it outside and hose it down

    She's never had the globe apart and I am judging this dirty, dirty lady but apparently, judging from the lack of disassembly instructions in the manual or even online, this is the standard of cleanliness for the Litter Robot

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  • Dan Fixes Coin-Opsifixcoinops@retro.social
    Sep 10, 2026, 3:05 AM

    It's rubber. The inside of the litter robot globe, where the cat shits and pisses and scratches with their fingerknives, is a rubber membrane. It's grippy matte black rubber. Why is there rubber in this? This is awful. I'm not having a good time. These are irredeemably filthy machines. These cannot be made clean. I've scrubbed and scrubbed but how the fuck do you clean scratched-up rubber. No. This is bad.

    A black rubber membrane like a deflated exercise ball, it has claw marks and it smells like very old cat shit
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  • Dan Fixes Coin-Opsifixcoinops@retro.social
    Sep 10, 2026, 3:06 AM

    Why is there foam glued to the places that get caked in cat litter? How are you supposed to clean it?

    You're not. You're not supposed to clean this.

    Image attached toot
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  • Dan Fixes Coin-Opsifixcoinops@retro.social
    Sep 10, 2026, 3:16 AM

    I work in coinops, when you play Street Fighter 2 your fingers are millimetres from rat shit, I'm not easily disgusted. But this machine is absolutely disgusting

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  • Dan Fixes Coin-Opsifixcoinops@retro.social
    Sep 10, 2026, 3:50 AM

    It's either, spend several hours minimum cleaning this thing every so often versus the ten minutes it takes to clean the rolly lad, or, there's gonna be a whole lot of Ignore It and Don't Think About It

    crevice bastard next to a powered-toothbrush-like cleaning tool
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  • Dan Fixes Coin-Opsifixcoinops@retro.social
    Sep 10, 2026, 5:06 AM

    I started around 8pm and had maybe an hours' worth of breaks and it's now 1am and it's probably about as clean as it's gonna get. The base is absolutely awful for getting clumps of pissy clay stuck all up in the crevices (pic alt text: pissy clay in crevices). Four fucking hours and I'm a guy who takes machines apart and cleans them For A Living, and I had to put together an improvised extra-long screwdriver longer than my standard Very Very Long screwdrivers out of bits taped together. And I've not even put it back together yet, it's still in bits drying out until the morning.

    And it still fucking stinks because of that utterly baffling idea of using soft rubber around cat shit.

    There's no fucking way that the average person is gonna do this once a month or so. If you've got one of these in your house I guarantee you it's filthier than you think it is. Taking the globe out out the back and hosing it down is just gonna get you a bunch of pissy clay water stuck inside the globe, and the base? Forget about it.

    Who fucking put this thought into my head... metafilter. It was metafilter. Fucking Ask Metafilter posts. If you've got a metafilter account, go and tell all those people they're wrong and also disgusting, tell them from me, tell them pinball dad says clean your litterbox. Clean your seven hundred dollar Pissy Clay In Crevices machine. Dirty animals

    Image attached toot
    Image attached toot
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  • Dan Fixes Coin-Opsifixcoinops@retro.social
    Sep 10, 2026, 5:13 AM

    When I say it's a disgusting machine I don't mean because it's secondhand and has someone else's cat shit in it, I mean it's an inherently disgusting machine. Pissing on rubber is a filthy thing to do. Having plastic support ridges around your toilet is a filthy thing to do. It's a disgusting machine because its design is disgusting, not because an innocent cat was coaxed into using it.

    Anyway I guess tomorrow I'll test/adjust/fix/order the weight sensor and we'll see if Herne likes it. I'm not gonna try and coax him into using it, I was damn tempted to put it straight out on the kerb pretty much the moment I got a look inside it, I'm just gonna treat this as a disappointment but a learning opportunity.

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  • Dan Fixes Coin-Opsifixcoinops@retro.social
    Sep 10, 2026, 12:23 PM

    Good morning, I'm still the opposite of impressed with the Litter Robot 3 Connect by Whisker

    In typing Whisker my fingers autocorrected me to Whiskey, it wasn't even my phone, it was my thumbs trying to tell me how to deal with it

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  • Dan Fixes Coin-Opsifixcoinops@retro.social
    Sep 10, 2026, 12:25 PM

    If I'd got this for free it'd be in a contractor bag and out for the binmen but I paid sixty bucks for this fucking thing so here I go again back into it I guess

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  • Dan Fixes Coin-Opsifixcoinops@retro.social
    Sep 10, 2026, 4:54 PM

    I sorted out the weight sensor, it just needed adjusting. Strictly speaking it's still out of spec but it's close enough for the computer to Deal With It.

    All three cats jumped in and made deposits in rapid succession, too quick even for the thing to decide to cycle in between. I guess the default timeout is 7 minutes post-cat, so we'll see in a few minutes whether it's gonna do the business

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  • Dan Fixes Coin-Opsifixcoinops@retro.social
    Sep 10, 2026, 5:20 PM

    OK it cycled, it did everything it was supposed to do, I can see now why people like these things, but I still would absolutely not recommend one unless you reallllly like toothbrushing pissy clay out of crevices. LOTS AND LOTS OF CREVICES, and you will NEVER get them all, and you won't be able to keep up with maintenance on one of these, so I'm gonna forever assume any Litter Robot I see is gonna be a thousand times more disgusting than it looks. I once used a decomposing chicken carcass as an ashtray, I've dug for motorbike parts through old chest freezers full of mouse skeletons, I've salvaged coils from pinball playfields caked in flood water including raw human sewage but if you buy a Litter Robot I'm gonna judge you as a dirty person and wrinkle my nose at you.

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  • Dan Fixes Coin-Opsifixcoinops@retro.social
    Sep 10, 2026, 6:47 PM

    🦝 This machine is bad and disgusting and I feel like a fool for buying one
    😻 I love it. This is great. It becomes Clean Enough™ immediately after I defile it.
    🦝 Maybe I should buy another for downstairs

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  • Cassey Lottmancassey@ottawa.place
    Sep 10, 2026, 1:06 AM

    @ifixcoinops ours (the “3” model, maybe it was fixed in the newer, even more expensive version) would frequently get stuck in the fully rotated position, that is, with no litter at all accessible to the cats. So if we wanted to be confident they wouldn’t be stuck litterless while ae were away from home, we’d need to leave another box just in case… which defeated the point of the fancy machine especially when the cats had the option of not using it, and so, didn’t

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  • David Nashdpnash@c.im
    Sep 10, 2026, 2:13 AM

    @cassey @ifixcoinops

    I’m pretty sure I have a “3”, and it has the same problem. Diagnosis in my case: if the blue light that makes up part of the “hey, there’s a cat inside” detector stops shining, at any time, the box won’t turn, and it will stop turning if it is already turning.

    For a while, making sure the light’s electrical contacts were clean and nothing was too loose kept things turning.

    For a while.

    It’s largely nonfunctional now, and I don’t plan to replace it with another automatic litter box.

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  • Gifliangiflian@techhub.social
    Sep 10, 2026, 1:26 AM

    @ifixcoinops they used a thinner liner on the Litter Robot 4 compared to the 3 (I have one of each) and I had to replace the newer liner because my cats had put holes in it.

    I'll use these until they die but I don't think I'd buy a new one

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  • Cheerios de Bergeracsexybenfranklin@smores.town
    Sep 10, 2026, 1:38 AM

    @ifixcoinops which version did you get? I just did a deep clean of our 4 that I got around 8 months ago, and it was pretty easy to take apart and clean. I agree, there are some design considerations I think they could improve, but otherwise I'm happy with it.

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  • Leaded SolderLeadedSolder@retrochat.online
    Sep 10, 2026, 3:02 AM

    @ifixcoinops I have been thinking about a litter robot, but the lack of information online definitely sketched me out about them too. Unfortunate, I was really hoping they were a magic solution to the dread menace of cat shit

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  • pun gentieure@retro.social
    Sep 10, 2026, 4:40 AM

    @ifixcoinops Nobody else in the history of this thing seems to have had a single thought of any kind, you'll have company at least.

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  • BettyCanRipBettyCanRip@macaw.social
    Sep 10, 2026, 4:47 AM

    @ieure @ifixcoinops
    Thanks for this. Everyone keeps convincing me to get one. I think I’ll just keep scooping out the clumps in the morning from the basic tray. Takes 30 seconds. Cat is happy. I’m happy.

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  • Erikedebill@wandering.shop
    Sep 10, 2026, 12:27 PM

    @ifixcoinops we had two we paid full price for and eventually ditched them for much cheaper models from Petsafe.

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  • Robin (going slightly mad)reb@retro.social
    Sep 10, 2026, 5:27 PM

    @ifixcoinops the chicken carcass thing reminded me of one time i went to visit a late friend of mine, it was the dead of winter and possibly snowing, he didn't smoke so i went to go outside for a rollie, to which he proffered me a piston from a BR Class 43 paxman valenta engine to use as an ashtray

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  • trachelipustrachelipus@masto.ai
    Sep 10, 2026, 12:41 PM

    @ifixcoinops Is this the model that amputates your cat's limbs if it starts moving while they're in it?

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  • Theafoundthefault@tech.lgbt
    Sep 10, 2026, 3:52 AM

    @ifixcoinops It's like someone watched a roomba run over a turd and thought it was a great prototype for a self cleaning litterbox.

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  • Robin (going slightly mad)reb@retro.social
    Sep 10, 2026, 10:42 AM

    @ifixcoinops Thank You Dan, this is exactly the sort of cat toilet I require, it's probably too late for my 5 year old shitheads to learn to shit in a covered litterbox, but their descendants will shit in something that makes it way easier for me to properly deal with their shit and piss

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