LitterWorks has a long affiliation with Littermaid self cleaning litter boxes, as we have been offering the popular Litter Disposal System for Littermaids for over 5 years. And, we do make it our business to understand what's out there on the market. For the past 4 months, we have been testing the Petsafe Simply Clean automatic self cleaning litter box and wanted to let you all know what we think!

First of all, the price is not bad at around $120, and it would be a steal if it worked as well as it claims to. I was pleasantly surprised at the weight of it, in all fairness it is not exactly a flimsy device. There were a lot of plastic mechanical components to be sure, but the drive train appeared to be pretty beefy. The mode of operation is interesting as well. This unit moves constantly (theoretically) at a very slow pace, slow enough for your cat not to notice. When you can uses the box, the clumps and waste are moved up a conveyor type system and then dropped into a waste bin. And around and around it goes, 24/7 (sometimes). I must admit that in theory it does have some very interesting properties, one being that there really is no "cleaning cycle" per-se, it is always in a cleaning cycle. As such it is nearly silent, except for some occasional "clicking" sounds. And it does work very well 70% of the time and does manage to deposit the majority of waste into the receptacle.

What I never have understood about self-cleaning litter box design though is that it seems that many of these devices are initially tested under clean laboratory conditions. I picture a scientist researching the "average" amount of cat urine output and the "average" size of #2, measuring these items carefully and doing lots and really putting the litter box to the test with thousands of repetitions, collecting columns of data, determining "average time to failure", and creating nice pretty reports that are shown in some board room to a bunch of marketing managers who all nod and agree that this thing is a winner! The self cleaning litter box that really works! Then they drop $250k on tooling and get Petsmart on the phone to purchase 10k of them.

Did anyone put a cat in it and ask her to do her "worst". Go ahead, pee down the edge of it, kick litter all over the sensors, jump on top of it, poop small, poop big, pee a river, pee a tiny squirt, whatever you can think of cat, this thing is bulletproof!

So did we find the holy grail of automatic self cleaning litter boxes with the Simply Clean? Almost. The problem boils down to the fact that it only really works well with "average" sized cat waste, deposited close to the middle of the tray.

1. If the clumps break up they go inbetween the tines of the conveyor system. Once on that track, they go around again and guess what? The pass exactly through the same space they did on the first pass, and around and around go the crumbs, gradually increasing in number until there is a "trail of crumbs" covering the entire litter area like a debis field.
2. If your cat should happen to do exactly what it is supposed to and make a nice big clump that holds together, we have another problem. As the big clump rides up the conveyor system, it dislodges the plastic housing, causing the machine to stop completely until you happen to notice, at which time you must remove the top, manually deal with the rogue clump and put it back together. This scenario happens to us every few days, and the cats doing the testing are only about 7-8 lbs each. If the conveyor housing was made just an inch taller, it would work a lot better, but as previously stated, it does not appear that this litter box underwent any substantial real world testing before going onto the market.
3. The cleaning mechanism lives in the litter tray, taking up a full 50% of the litter area. This leaves one of the smallest usable litter areas I've seen on a litter box, whether it be self cleaning or manual.

So, in conclusion, I would say that the Petsafe Simply Clean automatic self cleaning litter box "almost" made it. Perhaps on the next revision (if there is one), they can make it better. For now, I give it 3-stars.