I've been using self-cleaning slash automatic litter boxes since 2015 and I've been reviewing them on this channel since 2020. My first one, the Cat Genie, wasn't used much by my cats but the Litter-O-Bot 3 which I bought in 2018 was a big hit with my five cats at the time, hence the name of the channel. Some people criticise cat owners who use them as lazy, you know, just to make things easier for them. rather than actually better for their cats. I strongly disagree with this. Thanks to them, my cats always have a clean litter bed to use.
I've got seven cats now, and they use two litter robot fours. Unless you work from home all day every day, it's impossible to keep manual boxes clean for them when you're not home. Even with multiple boxes.
Well, I suppose if you had like ten, maybe you could do that. Cats don't want to use dirty boxes and these. machines mean they don't have to anymore. Over the last four years I've tested more than 20 different machines across five videos. Most of them haven't really been great and have had numerous issues, urine leaks being the most common problem.
In fact I've only really recommended a handful of different machines across the videos and some of those have caveats. The thing that I talk about in every review, the most important factor for any self-cleaning automatic litter box is safety. If there's any risk to my cats I will absolutely not use them no matter how good the rest of it is.
Of those 20 plus machines I've only encountered two that I don't consider 100% safe. One of them actually states in the instruction manual that you shouldn't use it unsupervised which is pretty ridiculous. defeats the purpose of it.
At the end of July there were a couple of posts in my self-cleaning litter box discussion group which shared a video on TikTok from a lady called Carly J who described how her automatic litter box killed a cat, a beautiful one-year-old Siamese girl called Moshi. Yesterday morning um We woke up, me and my two-year-old daughter, and I went to find my cat and she was hanging from her litter box. It had closed on her neck and her body was hanging out and there was red stuff all over, like everywhere, and she was gone. She didn't say what machine it was but she did clarify in the follow-up video that it wasn't an actual litter robot but something she'd bought off of Amazon.
She didn't name it in this video either but she did in the comments. Her videos started to go viral but then just a few days after they were uploaded they were gone. So I started to investigate I needed to know if this was real and if potentially deadly machines were being sold. I'd already found the one that she named on Amazon a few days earlier sold under the brand. Ams Toy.
Astonishingly they even called it Litter Robot by Ams Toy using Whiskers Litter Robot font. This is absolutely not a litter robot and it shows just how dodgy this company is. In a review section there was a photo of one covered in blood stating that it had killed their cat. It wasn't under her name but it had to be her machine. But after the TikTok videos were removed That review no longer had the photo on it and was now positive.
Then a few days later, the entire listing for the AMS toy was gone. There are also a lot of very similar looking machines in different names on Amazon and Wayfair in the US Not just under the Ams toy name. After looking at the photos and videos of them I saw a potential danger so I had to buy one to see for myself As Amazon and Wayfair in the UK don't sell any of them I had to buy it from AliExpress which I strongly recommend never doing but I had no choice It cost me £165.80 for shipping.
Four weeks later, it arrived. It had no brand on it, and they didn't actually send me the one I ordered, which was identical to the Amps toy version, minus the ears. But what I received was still the same fundamental design, just with a bigger waste bin and no ears. It's one of the countless generic machines which are generally bought in bulk and branded by a random company. That's why you see so many identical ones online with different names.
I immediately started testing it straight out the box as shipped and had my fears confirmed. I don't even know how I'm supposed to freak. The key thing that makes this machine dangerous is that the opening for the entrance is a single piece of plastic which is attached to the base.
Now this is fine for a machine that rotates on the x-axis, but this rotates on the y-axis, so as it cycles the opening closes. Because that piece of... plastic opening is attached to the base and not split in two, if a cat gets caught in it, then there's no escape. If the opening was split in two with the top part attached to the top section of the machine, like the Furbulous for example, then if a cat somehow got caught in it, then the top would lift off and the cat could escape.
I say somehow because it shouldn't get this far, as these machines have safety features. which are designed to stop a cleaning cycle, stop the rotation if it detects a cat. The vast majority of machines that rotate on the y-axis during a cleaning cycle don't have a top so there is no opening to close off. The machine that I bought does indeed have three safety features. There's the weight sensors, an infrared sensor on the front entrance that will pause the machine if a cat gets close to it or enters it.
The third safety measure is the pinch detector and this is very important. What it does if during the rotation it detects resistance then it's supposed to stop and move back. During these initial tests I found that whilst the sensors would pause the cycling if the weight and or infrared sensors were triggered this was only for a few seconds.
Here I'm pressing down, putting my weight on it and covering the infrared sensor. Both indeed pause the cycling briefly. It should not resume like this. If a cat put its paws on the front and peered in it should wait until those triggered sensors were cleared instead it just pauses briefly and resumes which is making both sensors redundant.
Now the pinch detector should be getting a sense of resistance from here and reversing. But it doesn't, it carries on! Ah! God! That really hurts.
I don't know if you can see in my hand the marks. I was able to free myself, but that really hurts. The inside rim of the plastic opening is actually quite sharp too, so that combined with the force and the three safety measures all failing to do their job made this machine incredibly dangerous.
Once I had finished these initial tests I connected it to the Tuya Smart App to see if there were any firmware updates and yeah, there was one. So I installed it. And amazingly the sensors started to work properly including the pinch detector. So were all my tests a complete waste of time and its design safe?
Well no. My machine sends me without the new firmware and there was nowhere any documentation of the manual and no message from the seller to tell me to make sure that I keep the firmware up to date and to keep checking through the app. In fact the manual didn't have any safety instructions whatsoever, didn't even say. that there is a minimum weight before you should turn on automatic cycling. To put your own branding on a generic machine, you generally need to buy a minimum of 1,000 units.
With at least a dozen machines sold under different names of similar designs, including the Amstoy, that means there's tens of thousands of these potential death traps out there, maybe even more, and with a lot of them already being used in people's homes. From my experience in my Facebook group, I know that many people don't bother with apps which means if they have one of these then they won't have the safer firmware are the sellers on amazon wayfair and aliexpress contacting people who've bought them to tell them that they must update the firmware well if this was a single machine sold by a well-known brand i'm sure they would but with all these different random companies it's doubtful i just really hope that they are then there's just how good are the sensors how reliable are they Sensors fail, especially cheap sensors. And looking at the build quality of this, I highly doubt the sensors are high quality.
So if the sensors stop working, then you still have this incredibly dangerous design of the opening closing off with no way to escape. Even if it didn't have these safety issues, it's a bad machine that's badly made. It doesn't have a litter mat inside it, just bare plastic. A rotating machine needs to have a non-stick litter mat liner. that when it cycles it drops in the middle to dislodge clumps without one.
Urine clumps will just stick to the plastic. It won't be pleasant. About a week ago Carla J messaged me in the TikTok app in reply to one of my comments on her videos. We had quite a few conversations and she told me what happened, why she had removed the videos.
And I told her that everything is off the record, it's just for my research. But she said she was happy for me to use anything. and she sent me photos and a video of her beloved Moshi.
Amsoy had given her financial settlement to delete the videos and the Amazon review. As part of the settlement, Amsoy would remove the machine from sale. Her husband was unable to delete the Amazon review, so he changed it to a positive one.
I'm absolutely not judging her for taking the settlement. I don't know how much she received. She did say that it wasn't much, but she did it under the assurance that...
Amstoy would remove their product from Amazon. The thing you should realise is that it's sold under so many different names and different variations of the same design. Removing the Amstoy version is going to make very little difference.
Carly also told me about a lady called Trish who messaged her to say that her cat had also been killed by the Amstoy machine and she put me in touch with her. Trish's kitten Charlie was three months old. and over the minimum weight that the manual states a cat should be before turning on auto cycling. On the 19th of July, Trish got a video call from her 13 year old daughter frantically telling her that Charlie's neck was caught in the closed opening.
When her daughter showed her on the phone camera, she could see that it was already too late. Because she was far away at the time, Trish called the non-emergency police phone number and an officer came around, had her daughter wait outside. and freed poor Charlie, placing his lifeless body on the bed. He was a rescue kitten and had been in his forever home for just four weeks before his life was horrifically cut short. Trish also shared with me a review on the now deleted Ab's toy Amazon listing about a cat that had also gotten stuck in the opening but the owner was able to rescue her in time.
But it doesn't end there. There was another Facebook post in my Facebook group that shared this story about a five-month-old kitten that was found suffocated in a waste drawer. I wasn't able to contact the person who posted this originally or the owner of the cat to confirm any of this, but it's entirely plausible that the kitten could have ended up in the waste bin and suffocated.
It's a horrible thought. I tried to contact Amstoy to get a statement, but their online presence is... Very minimal and especially now that the Amazon listings are gone.
I did find their YouTube channel so I left a comment asking asking if they could get in touch with me. They didn't reply or email me. Instead, they deleted my comments.
Deleting seems to be their way of dealing with things. If you own an Amstoy or any other similar design machines, then please update the firmware. Then make sure you test it like I have in this video. But even if you can update the firmware, I just don't think you should use it anymore.
I hope this video can help get all of them removed from sale. everywhere and get to the people who already have them to warn them. Amazon and Wayfair must act and act fast and remove all of them.
The ones on eBay and AliExpress will be a lot harder to stop being sold but I hope they are. I couldn't return the dangerous machine to AliExpress for a refund despite the listing setting free returns. They insisted that I pay for the return shipping.
I got some quotes to send it back to China because it's so big and so heavy. The very cheapest that I could find was £236 and my refund would be £240. So I sent it back, I'd get £4 back.
Great. So yeah, don't buy from AliExpress, don't buy these generic machines, don't buy these brands which have all these random names. Buy from recognised brands, ideally with a history of making self-cleaning automatic litter boxes. And if they don't have a history, at least they have made other electronic cat products and not just some startup. And I would also be careful about anything on Indiegogo because these are beta machines and you are going to be testing them.
I'd always recommend waiting at least a year after the machine's been out to let it all settle in and be much better. Do your research, check out reviews. There's lots of them out there, but you can't trust a lot of them, especially the Amazon ones. A lot of them are fake. There's ones which have been paid for in exchange for the product.
And obviously YouTube reviews. There's mine and those are incredibly thorough and I completely stand by them so check those out. There are other videos on YouTube.
Some of them are very good but some of them aren't. Especially the ones which say they're reviews but they've clearly been paid for by the company. If you've been paid to make a review it's not a review it's A commercial.
I was really unhappy with the safety features of the Popa X5 in my review of it. Is it any better now? A little bit as they've added some firmware which only extends the rake out fully if there's enough litter. But they're still insisting that it's safe for cats of any size including kittens and ferrets.
That's absolute nonsense as no machine should be used by cats under a certain weight with auto cleaning on. They do. say in the FAQ on their website put on the fence when using it with them. This isn't mentioned in the manual's basically non-existent safety instructions.
Cats and especially kittens as you know are notorious for getting themselves into all sorts of pickles as shown in this TikTok video from March. If the bin lid closes on a kitten in the waste bin there's no way they could get out without intervention from a human. Popa need to stop saying it's safe for kittens. How is this safe? That could have been a kitten, a tiny kitten.
They claim this is safe for kittens. You got thrown into the wastebasket, Dusky, and that could have closed on you, and you could have suffocated in there. There are very few sensors in the X5.
I was told the reason is by the CEO of Popa, the man who threatened to sue me, said he found machines that kept stopping during a cleaning cycle annoying. He trusted in his machine's mechanics and a cat's sense of self-preservation. Right, please don't let what happened to Charlie and Moshi put you off buying self-cleaning litter boxes.
They are safe. Well, the vast majority of them are. Please still make sure you maintain them and keep them clean. As I've said many times on this channel, the Litter-Robot 4s are easily my favorite self-cleaning litter boxes. and they are packed with safety features, entry sensors, weight detection, pinch detectors and even sensors in the waste bin to detect movement.
And if the Lizzo Robot 4 detects any issues with any sensors then it will tell you through the app and its light display on the front and it won't auto cycle until the issue is resolved. Many of the newer machines have the waste bin inside the cylinder which means there's no openings which makes them super safe. The downside is having the waste bin there as you don't have any waste bin fall detectors and the bins tend to be really quite small.
My favourite budget machine is now the new Furrytel which is made by UPTEC who also make my previous favourite, the Aerobo, otherwise known as the Meowwant SC01. It's super safe, pretty nice size inside and the waste compartment is a bit bigger than the others although there's still no pin fall centre. I will be covering this in a review as soon as I can along with my new little robot.
4 review which will cover my two and a half years of using them as well as the surprisingly great new litter auto refilling litter hopper accessory if any of my videos have been helpful please use the affiliate links in the description including one that will give you 50 off the little robot 4. it helps me make videos like this and buy machines to test and review and if they have really helped you then please consider using the thanks button below the video I really appreciate it. That's it from this sad but important video. I hope to see you in a happier one soon.