The main feature of the new Litter-Robot 5 Pro upgrade is a dual camera that uses AI to identify your cat inside and outside of the box to provide greater detail about their visits, including recorded videos. I’ve tested it at home for four weeks, with one senior cat, and a consumer tester has tried it as well.
It also has a proprietary WasteID feature to identify solid or liquid waste. It can cycle sooner to get rid of solid waste faster, or pause to give liquid waste time to clump before cycling. This is the quietest self-cleaning litter box I have ever used.
✔️ HOW IT WORKS: In most every way it operates the same as the Litter-Robot 4, our best overall choice. The rubber-lined interior globe sifts out waste and hides it in a waste drawer after your cat has used the box. It requires clay clumping litter.
The camera records your cat in front of the box and inside the box. A livestream runs at all times on the app. Watch for up to 5 minutes a day. It captures and stores footage—short video clips, saved for 2 days—of a cat or cats passing, approaching, and going in and out of the Litter-Robot 5 Pro.
It does a good job of not recording people, but if people pass by along with a cat, they will be recorded, too. It also records audio in the clips. During testing, everyone in my family was recorded at some point. It acts more or less like a pet camera.
Invest in the Whisker+ service to get more, including unlimited livestream and a 30-day video history. Whisker+ also provides a daily summary of visits, similar to how some baby monitors will give you a daily wrap-up for a fee. There’s a free 7-day trial period but you have to enter your credit card to activate it, and after the free month you’ll be charged $8/month, or $80 for a year.
Also new on the 5: There’s a front display screen that broadcasts the duration of your cat’s last visit, the cat’s name and weight, when the machine is going through a cleaning cycle, and more. Inside, LED lights can be customized to any of hundreds of color combinations. In the app you can also turn the lights off completely.
✔️ TESTING NOTES: I am delighted with the camera when my husband and I travel and want to check in on Helen, our senior cat, who is now our only cat at home. (Azula moved with our adult child to a new apartment, along with the Litter-Robot 4.) I’m less delighted with it when we’re home and it’s catching us in videos along with the cat.
Like our consumer tester, I am super appreciative of the digital display, a feature I wish they would add to the Litter-Robot 4. “I feel like I always know what is going on,” she said. As far as the camera goes, her feeling was, “I am not that interested in watching my cat use the litter box when I am away.”
I have it sitting beside Helen’s analog litter box and so far, she’s sticking with her old one and resisting the Litter-Robot 5 Pro. But I’ve scooped some of her waste into the machine and run the cleaning cycle, to test it, and it works well. Our consumer tester has had nothing but success: Her cat loves the Litter-Robot 5. She reported a few caveats, like her cat tracking litter out of it, and the fact that the machine is so tall.
I feel the Litter-Robot 5 Pro is even quieter than the Litter-Robot 4, though that’s not a claim the company makes. The waste drawer is easy to open and close and five waste bags, which come with the device, make tossing out used litter fast and simple. You’ll want to buy more waste liners, sold in a box of 25.
There’s a button that makes it easy and quick to dump all the litter into the drawer, if you want to clean the globe and add new litter. I’ve twice hit that button thinking it was for the clean cycle, so there’s a learning curve, for me, memorizing which button does what!
✔️ ALSO GOOD TO KNOW: To connect the device to the app, I had to use my home guest wifi network, not our high-speed network. Once you get it going this machine is very low-maintenance, but it did take me about an hour and a half to unbox the Litter-Robot 5 Pro, get it upstairs into a position where it worked with its six-foot cord, and successfully pair it to my app. I got help from customer service, and so did our consumer tester. We agreed that the service is excellent.
Source: Home Ideas - goodhousekeeping.com
