The good part is that there is no more litter dust aggrevating allergies, no more insinuating stinks – or a way whole lot less, and any cleanup is much much reduced from litter box days – when the thing works as it should. I do agree a side wall method would be good, and a removable method is good, as i now know why it has to be removable. I’m not too crazy about the enclosed (dark) igloo dome, and invision an open set of walls that clip onto the rim, somehow. Higher walls or not, I figure i’ll save in litter what i paid for the device, if it lasts a year, and it looks well enough made to last longer – we’ll see – i do watch the reviews looking for longer term owner remarks. The little rocks in the mat and on the floor are a whole lot less than the litter crud i used to find, all over the place, and in a small apartment, messes are magnified easily. Having had opossums show up on occasion, i’m not jazzed about litter boxes on the porch, either – or the neighbor’s cats considering it their turf. I hadn’t considered the green aspects of the CG until i read that online somewhere, but it does make sense to keep animal waste out of landfills – as well as the clay litter that doesn’t do any dumping place any good. I just simply love not having any more literal pain due to lugging litter (used or new) to and fro. That was enough incentive for me, but the green, bioethics, health question of waste disposal is also worth consideration.

I have enough back and hand joint pain to change my life style, as they say, and cannot drive due to low vision – both also temper my use of a computer, so writing this also comes at a significant price. How that figures into the installation and use of a CG is information that should figure into any well done customer survey for a product like the CG. While i have technical expertise in a multi-disciplined science lab as a technician (not biology and not chemistry, but several other areas you may be able to think of), it was my physical and visual limits that almost stopped the project before it even got installed. I had it a month before it was fully installed and usable, because of the tee connection to the water line. It is truly amazing what little detail can fuddle up even simple things, with or without technical expertise. The CG installation and use did definitely humble me, and this experience should give an elder thinking of this purchase cause for pause before purchase.

I tried to explain this to the mfg’r with detailed emails and pictures from the beginning, but they seem to have mis – interpreted my dilemma as a prank or joke or some wierd potential spurious litigation. I hope they rethink the plight of older citizens who live in apartments again, because it isn’t always easy getting the little bit of help that is needed, especially if the purchaser can’t drive a vehicle (which also complicates use and repairs).

After their reaction to my initial connection dilemma, i didn’t bother sending in the warranty, as they already had the S/N from my email, and i don’t think they wanted to honor it. Their reaction teed me off, and i waited not so patiently until i finally got a knowledgable church buddy to help me (who happened to be a mechanical enginner who taught himself to make prosthetics and build his own business – a not so mean feat in So Calif), and help me he did – all six foot feet plus of him scrunching down in the small dimly lit space my apartment bathroom provided to do it – the space where the tee has to go is so small, you almost can’t get a light, your tools, and your hands in there to do the job. Unlike the folks at CG, he was very gracious and understanding of the situation. For what it’s worth, i’ve spent time visiting folks in their nineties, who live in apartments similar to mine, and i’ve done things for them, as this fellow did for me – but i admit it wasn’t doing plumbing for them – a not fun thing for me more than for more whole folks – and i used to go on jobs with my father, who, among other things, was a plumber – but those days are long gone.

I’ve had cats for years, and have have spent years lugging in new litter and old stinky litter out. I now have one large, old male cat, but i’ve had more in previous days. It took about three weeks to get him over to the new CG, and i finally had to remove the old box and close him up in the apartment. He uses it now with few problems, as long as it works as it should.

My research revealed that the CG unit was the only way out of that litter cycle – I had to find a way to make it work, come hell or high water. I, too, almost bought things like Littermaid, but none of them eliminated the new / old litter cycle. I finally bit the bullet and went for the $300.00 purchase when i had the funds to do it.

Stooping and lifting that amount of weight repeatedly made me think thrice and twice, until i tripped over the CG on the internet at a pet store where i was ordering cat food – so i don’t have to lug that home, too, but only from my porch to the cabinet it stays in during storage. I even considered putting the cat down (or ding the animal shelter thing – which is the same thing, frequently). It was so painful to manipulate the litter stuff, that I thought my cat owning days were just about finished.

I researched as did those above and finally went to the mfg’ing source online – and knowing something about plumbing, i wondered about that tee connection to the water feed line. I know how many sizes of any plumbing fitting there are, and the two they offered didn’t seem to cover all the bases possible, especially in apartments – I thank God i wasn’t living in a trailer, where fixtures are totally different than in houses.

When i informed CG of the dimensional problem (I did err in estimating what size i needed, but that wasn’t all there was to that – and better communications on their part could have offset that), they said they couldn’t provide fittings for everyone, which i thought was downright silly (and arrogant). One of their reps even said he lived in an apt, and that if his fit his, then i shouldn’t have any problems, but he was in error. I was more than stunned at the flip way they disposed of a problem that couldn’t be only me. The space to work in under the tank is so small that it is impossible to totally eliminate the leak caused by the necessity to use a three stage adapation scheme with fittings, so i keep a small plastic container under the ‘tee’-off rig. Yes, it has teflon tape in it, and yes, it is as tight as the stop cock also under the tank will let it go. Not all things are perfect in apartments.

Ultimately, they referred me to an online parts house made for yuppies, which appeared to me to be designed make you look at every part but the ones you need, as if they want you to buy much more – very slickly designed website but not one i would call clean and useful. In my case, i felt ripped off, and it wasn’t a simple tee I needed, but a set of four fittings to approximate a tee, with adaptations for the three different diameters and two different thread types needed to do the required job. Easier to do than explain.

It took my engineering buddy about 5 seconds to accurately size it all up and bring me the parts the next time we met at church – and he didn’t want me to reimburse him. The folks at CG didn’t want to be bothred, and that sucks. Once given an accurate dimensional and threading report, they COULD provide what was needed, IF they wanted to.

So, what they were willing to provide as an easy fix for them didn’t fit my situation, and it took a friend, his car, and a store i could not get to to get to full project completion. OK, enough of that, but any electro mechanical gizmo will develop problems, so i wondered what comes next. It did, but in the meantime, I have thoroughly enjoyed NOT buying litter and NOT carrying out the old stuff, too. I just love walking down the supermarket pet aisle, NOT having to buy either litter or cat food, and yes, those pellets and the solution for the CG cost a lot less than litter. I actually smirk in pure pleasure walking past the litter shelves in the market.

I’ve also enjoyed reading the back and forth about the smart chip reverse engineering (and i read the patent pages, too) of what’s in the sani-solution box, and it’s only a matter of time before that gets knocked off by someone, indeed as it did for ink jet printer cartridges. Japan got over its junk product days (I’m old enough to remember not wanting to buy anything Japanese), and China will, too, if not some other country, first. Americans can’t seem to hold onto product producing companies, any more – unfortunately. In the meantime, I enjoy the CG, whether the cat does, or not – but he does use it.

I think this CG is wonderful for those with enough physical limits to make handling cat litter more than distasteful, but the same caveat applies to getting on hands and knees (or lying prone in very small spaces) to install a tee (or get on the floor to do the PM part of it when it clogs). It also complicates cleaning the thing, and i’ve had two bouts of that in the last month of use, so here’s the scoop on that.

READ THE MANUAL !!!!! THE BELOW IS EVEN FUNNIER IF YOU DO.

I went through the 3 beeps and standing water in the bowl, too. The first time it clogged, it beeped and i had standing water, but it did eventually self clear, with a huge clump crashing out of the tube hanging over the rim of the toilet (i don’t have a laundry room I can use). With all my technical and scientific expertise, I should know to READ the manual well . . . The second time it clogged, I didn’t get any beeps, but I did get standing water. Repeat runnings didn’t clear it.

The first time i didn’t take it all apart, or back flush it, but i did unplug it from the electrical outlet, remove all the water and rocks, stick my hand down the waste dispsal hole to see if the impeller turned freely, pulled off the top part with the sani solution in it to check any rotating part or gear i could find – then I put that aside – and generally turned the bowl part over and around several times attempting to jostle loos what i thought might be jammed in the waste pathway, while imagining the path way i couldn’t see without taking it apart. Got away with that the first time, not the second.

Fortunately, a different fix-it friend was with me the second time. His suggestion was back flushing, but both tub and sink faucets in my tiny bathroom are bigger than the waste hose will fit over . . . I can’t take it to the communal laundry room, and didn’t want to lug it fifty feet down a hill and up three steps to do that, anyway. I do have a garden hose I’d have to string out a living room window on the sly, and I have one of those six way handles that will pretty much fit any faucet from which mnaagement removes the handles to prevent kids playing around with it. I didn’t want to do the backflush thing if i could get out of it. But i forgot the next most obvkous thing that the manual mentions FIRST before backflushing . . .

My friend and i took the thing almost down to field stripping proportions. His grip stringth saved me, and the lack of mine would have stopped me doing what we did, as simple as it was to intuit without the manual. After i cleaned and reassembled it, and plugged it back into the electricity, it was still not draining. Everything worked, except very little water came out. I could hear the impeller turning and the soledoids turning it on and off – oh, God, we have to backflush, I thought . . . after we’d probed through the impeller path from above and below with a wire coat hanger (by taking the waste hose off and putting it back on) . . . we found no obstructions, whatsoever.

In frustration, I picked up the end of the drain hose off the toilet rim and raised it up over my head and then back down again, not so slowly. Gunk came rushing out (the CG was almost at the end of its pumping cycle, as it happens), and I got a movie type spray that missed the toilet, bounced off the nearby walll and got me, too. I should have done that first. Ha-ha. READ THE MANUAL.

Well, i discovered something else while cleaning it when it was in its basic four pieces (base, rim, bowl, and electronics assembly). When i had the previous litterbox, litter and its associated fine powder was in the mat I had purchased that the CG rested on, now – it’s a plastic mat with tiny soft little plastic curly things that trap the litter (and the CG rocks) – it’s got cat paw patterns in the corners of it, and its blue – some come in gray. I’ve been using a B&D Dust Devil hand vac to suck up the little rocks and then scrape them out of the filter to put them back in the bowl, after being careful to not let the fuzz also in the filter not remain in the bowl. Now i see what I did wrong, otherwise, about that.

First, i underestimated the amount of old litter powder the Dust Devil was extracting from the mat in the last several vacuumings of that mat. Those little plastic curly things in the mat hold a lot i didn’t realize was in it. I thought I had removed the powder and fuzz before putting the rocks back into the bowl – worng. Cleaning the CG revealed the unmistakable slippery slime of wet clay litter powder everywhere under the bowl, inside the base, including where the waste path through the impeller chamber is. Obviously, the clay was making the little rocks stick to it, and that somehow impeded the pumpimng action even though the impeller was seemingly free to move.

I removed one rather sizable lot of little rocks and clay slime, but not the matted hair and poo as I had expected. Before my friend and I disassembled it, I did find some tough thread wound around the impeller shaft, just above the impeller. I had to cut it out, so I expectd more somewhere else. Never found any more, and I don’t know where the thread stuff entered in, except that it wasn’t there the last time it clogged.

So, I now understand why they say don’t use ANY litter stuff but their own rocks in the CG – and I didn’t intentionally put litter into it, or so I thought. So, be careful about the method you use to recycle rocks in your CG, if you attempt that. I’ve paid the price for my salvage attempt, and I’ll be cleaning the bathroom for quite a while after this one.

Even so, I LOVE the CG while hoping for a design that allows easier access to the impeller area – some form of trap door arrangement would be nicer than what it currently takes an elderly body with poor eyes to do – which means doing things partly by ‘braile’, so to speak, and with a friend to offset what i can’t do with carpal tunnel in the hands and arthritis in the back. Believe me, I prefer to be independent. But, as many in the senior bracket know, some personal preferences just can’t be met as they were in younger days – at all, or as fast as some designers of gadgets seem to expect from their customers.

Perhaps the folks at CG should reconsider the market niche in those who qualify for things like AARP – a population that will only grow – already is – since this is one of the results of not only better nutrition and medicine in this century, but also from those missing forty or so million children that never got born because they were aborted. Sorry, but that statistic matters in ways many haven’t yet realized. In that forty million number of missing souls are absent would be plumbers, designers, and all sorts of people that could help older folks with simple problems like finding tees for gadgets like CG’s, fixing clogs in things like CG’s, and doing the PM’s (preventative maintenance) that all electro mechanical gadgets inevitably need. As it is, who do you call to fix things like a CG, if you can’t do it yourself? The folks at CG didn’t seem to care about that for me, or how long it would take me to find someone to help so i could use it initially, or continue to use it, later. It’s so easy to say don’t buy it if you can’t handle the plumbing necessities it creates. Another oddity about the AARP group, women live longer than men, so many more households will have non fix-it people who live alone in them. CG didn’t want to consider that market niche and didn’t like being told the particulars of that.

If you are over 60 or incapacitated in any way, thinnk twice and thrice about balancing out what you have to do or put up with – with litter – or with a CG. God bless you all as you trade one pain for another. Still, so far, i’d rather have the CG than the litter, but i didn’t appreciate the snot from the folks making the CG, who also sold it to me on line – how convenient remote business is, isn’t it . . . for them more than I or people like me.

Thank you for listening, and if you pray for the problems of elders, thank you even more.

My daughter came home from college for the summer and along with her came her cat too. Now there are 3 using the box and there isn’t any problems. I just had to adjust the cleaning cycles from 2-4! It’s just GREAT!

As far as the granules getting all over the floor, I purchased the dome and I have much less on the floor than I did before. I also have a grate that I purchased from PetSmart that captures most of the granules. Much less sweeping for me now!

If you are at all considering this product and have any reservations, DON’T, it will be the best cat product purchase you will make. Go for it…you’ll love it!

I would make a couple of design changes if I were the manufacturer. I would put some kind of scraper at the top of the rim to scrape the permanent litter off the rim of the rotating bowl when it backs up behind the scoop. Or I would change the angle of the scoop so that the litter wouldn’t back up to the top of the bowl rim. I would also put an abort button on the unit to stop the cleaning cycle when the unit gets plugged up. Too much of the permanent litter ends up in the inner workings of the Cat Genie, which contributes to the clogs. Most of the litter than ends up inside is stuck to the scoop and gets shaken off into the solid waste hopper. Perhaps a few more shakes before the solid stuff gets dropped into the hopper. It would be nice if I could set it up to clean more than four times a day. I frequently run manual cycles to keep up with the output of my six cats. Again, the Cat Genie is very clear in its literature that it is designed for up to three cats. I am pushing the envelope with six.

I like the Cat Genie, but it needs a couple of tweaks. I am so happy not to have to clean a conventional litter box and deal with the litter and litter dust all over the house. No lingering smells either. I’m not sure how the cats feel about it, but they seem to want to use it and they are no longer afraid the the noise.

Unfortunately when I tried to run it the basin wouldn’t spin. I called Customer Support and they were great. They walked me through taking the unit apart and we found a bar was blocking the unit from spinning. Once this was fixed the unit worked fine.

Worked great for a couple of cycles and then it jammed while draining. I figured out that the toilet seat was pinching the hose and once I lifted the seat it drained fine. Now I just keep the seat up.

So now after all of my issues the unit is working great. I have one cat and run it twice a day. I still have to do a little manual scooping with small poops that the rake misses but this is so much better than the messy gross Litter Maid that I had.

I found it very easy to set up, by myself, not being a huge do-it-yourselfer. I put it in my laundry room and just followed the instructions. The water connection leaked at first, and it appeared to be a problem with the hose itself. I called the help line, not really expecting to get much real help, but to my surprise, a real person answered, spoke my language in a dialect I could understand, was very friendly and helpful, and sent a new hose out to me immediately. I got it less than 48 hours later, and had no more problems with the installation. It was one of the best “help-desk” experiences I’ve ever had (and I’ve had MANY!)!

The CatGenie then proceeded to work exactly as advertised. It was kind of fun to watch it go through its whole cycle of scooping, washing, flushing, and drying (somewhere around 30 minutes). I only watched the whole thing once, since it does take a chunk of time, but I did watch parts of it over the first few days. It’s really quite fascinating!

My cat used it the very first day. If there is one drawback to the CatGenie, it would be that occasionally SOME of the solids produced by my cat are apparently a little smaller than the spaces in the scooping mechanism, and fall through instead of getting removed from the box. However, being small, they’re not that noticeable visually, they don’t seem to have any noticeable odor after they have endured the whole cleaning and sanitation cycle, and they don’t stay around very long. The cleaning action tends to reduce and flush them away by the second or third time.

The CatGenie cycle can be run manually any time, or can be put on a timer to run automatically. I purchased it for this reason, because I travel a lot and did not want to relegate the litter-scooping job to other people all the time (not that I particularly like it myself). I found that the CatGenie ran exactly as I would have expected, based on the advertising and information I could find about it. The timer works and the cleaning cycles run when I expect them to.

It does make a small amount of noise during its cleaning cycle (which I run only when my cat is sleeping and nowhere around), but nothing particularly loud or troublesome. It’s not as loud as, say, the dishwasher or washing machine, and doesn’t run as long. It’s nowhere near as loud as the vacuum cleaner!

The cleaning cycle ends with the granules being dried by a jet of hot air, which sends the scent of the sani-solution throughout the house. Now, the scent is really quite pleasant as artificial scents go, and I think most people would be fine with it, but I am not a person who likes scented things much, so this is less than ideal for me. It is DEFINITELY a lot better than stinky-litterbox-smell, though! If the CatGenie people are reading this, I’d suggest offering an alternative “unscented” version of the sani-solution. I’d also love it if the number of uses remaining in the cartridge could be seen somewhere on the cartridge. Since I travel so much, I would like to keep an eye on how many uses are left in case I need to put a new cartridge in before I leave on a trip. The CatGenie does beep to warn you when there are only 10 uses left, but I may not be there until several days after it starts beeping, so it would be good to see a number somewhere.

Unfortunately, my cat STOPPED using it after 4 or 5 days. I’m not exactly sure why (I have a very quirky and neurotic cat), but I am now working on a new acclimation routine for him, and looking forward to the day he is using the CatGenie full-time again.

Bottom line: In true Minimal Effort(tm) fashion, this product can eliminate the parts you hate about having a cat, and make your life with your pet much more pleasant, as it was meant to be. It is a well-designed, high-quality product, with high-quality support at the home office. Supplies are easy to find and will cost you no more than it used to cost you for cat litter. I highly recommend this as a Minimal Effort(tm) product!