But if you know your cat is ready for crystal litter, then the PetSafe Scoop-Free Smart Covered Self-Cleaning Litter Box is one of the best ways to take full advantage. The automated box rakes through the litter 20 minutes after your cat is done using it, moving solid waste to a separate compartment. Meanwhile, the silica crystals absorb urine and other smells. Once a month (for a single-cat household), you simply slide out the entire tray, put a lid on it, and throw it away. The automatic cleaning is remarkably quiet and the comb slowly passes through the litter to weed out solid waste. You never have to touch—and you barely even have a chance to spot—the waste your cat leaves behind.

Because the clumps get dumped into the bottom drawer, there is no litter covering up the waste," our tester noted, describing the result as a more "prominent" smell.

Finally, testers were asked to give their overall impressions, rating how they perceived the product's value, both before and after learning the retail price. Make sure you clean out your litter box every day. Don’t let too much poop pile up before scooping it out! If it’s not fleas, it may be litter mites or even litter box gnats. These tiny insects love to live and breed in cat boxes that don’t get cleaned regularly. You can buy special dusting powder from your vet which will help kill them off or try spraying the box with vinegar after each use and then giving it a good scrubbing with dish soap. How to get rid of bugs in cat litter? Find out what type of bug it is. Different bugs require different treatments. There are a few things you can do to keep bugs and litter mites away from your litter box. Here are some of the best ones:

The Litter-Robot 4 features a sealed waste drawer and carbon filter which help reduce litter box odors. The flexible Carbon Filter pad sits directly over the Waste Drawer to absorb odors. Under normal use, one filter should last approximately 1 month. The Carbon Filter is not required for the unit to function.Of course, this means buying a whole new tray of crystal litter every month, or even more often. So while the PetSafe ScoopFree is much more affordable than our Best Overall automatic littler box, the cost of using the same expensive litter each month will add up fast. While it's possible to dump out the waste reservoir without completely replacing the litter tray, our tester found this to be an unwieldy task, requiring lifting away the entire upper assembly of the device. Odor control was also excellent with the Smarty Pear, even with the large waste drawer, which enables you to go a week or more without emptying. In a tester home with a single cat, the reservoir bag could remain in place for up to a month without any noticeable odors—but the bag was cumbersome to remove. In homes with multiple kitties sharing the Smarty Pear, we recommend changing the reservoir weekly and taking advantage of the additional spin cycle feature that ensures waste is filtered out.

While we think the Litter-Robot 4 is a substantial improvement over its predecessor, the Litter-Robot 3 Connect is still a high quality product. It's a little larger (more than 2 inches wider), less attractively designed, and a little louder, but the reduced price might make the previous Litter-Robot model worth your consideration.

In a home setting, we found the PetSafe ScoopFree to be effective at both self-cleaning and odor control. Plus, unlike the Litter-Robot 4, the PetSafe won't take up a ton of space in your home so it's a great option for apartment dwellers. Using a blue modeling compound dipped in water to simulate solid waste, our testers then rated each box on its performance. Water scented with vinegar was used to test how well a box could contain or eliminate smells. Once each automatic litter box was put through multiple cleaning cycles, filtering several days' worth of waste, we emptied each box of litter and gave each one a thorough cleaning. Historical Data: Visualize daily, weekly, and monthly activity to identify patterns and irregularities Cleaning the Litter-Robot 4 was also a cinch. The bags used in the reservoir are tall enough that even an over-stuffed reservoir is easy to empty—simply lift up the edges of the bag and use that extra height to tie it off. There's a QR code on the bottom of the reservoir that provides a retail link for easily purchasing new bags, smell filters, and even litter (but it doesn't require proprietary litter, and worked great with our generic, store-bought litter).