Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Update Again: I am removing a star. This thing just won't report the amount of litter remaining. No matter how much litter is in it, it reports as FULL. No matter how many times I calibrate it, it is still a no go. So at the moment, half of the litter is gone and it says "FULL". It weights my cat correctly, but doesn't seem to understand how much litter is there. When the litter is this low, and I do a manual clean, it tells me the cat is inside and won't do anything. Power cycling will then tell me there is 3.2 lbs of additional weight inside, as if I have added litter when I have not. I am going to give it a big STAY AWAY and go with the Pura X model instead. It was great. This unit needed a lot more R&D before being released. To just note a difference in how Pura X and Pura Max are calibrated. The Pura X had you remove all litter and calibrate so that the drum was the empty. Then when you added litter, it detected it and told you like 14lbs added. So basically it zeroed the scale while empty. With the Pura Max, it acts more like the TARE function on a scale, which means you add the litter to the max line, and then calibrate so that it zeros the scale even with something there. Update: The deodorizer, which is now in the main chamber where the cat goes, does not seem to turn off if the cat enters during deodorization. I have had to take my cat to the vet for respiratory distress. When I removed the deodorizer unit, her symptoms subsided. I did a test and it definitely ran the deodorizer even when I blocked the sensor and it said the cat was in the litter box. I am not sure if this is a flaw or by design. The deodorizer unit is a separate battery powered device that is paired to the litter box (by Bluetooth perhaps). I ended up moving it to the waste container like the original Pura X. My cat has not had any issues since. My vet even said she didn’t understand why they would have put it in the cat chamber because cats can have susceptible respiratory systems and that was crazy that there something being sprayed where they could inhale it. I raved about the Pura X on reddit and several people purchased because of my thorough reviews and reported back they loved it. I now have a second cat (well she is 9 wks) and so I decided to upgrade to the newer Pura Max. I am not sure how this is an upgrade. I will continually be comparing back to the Pura X because I have first hand experience with that. Outside Exterior Design: The old Pura X hide the drum in a stylish box that even has a cat pad accessory for the top so your cat can lay on it, or you can stack boxes of litter on it as I did. The new Pura Max has the drum exposed. This allowed me to encounter my first complaint with that design. My cat frequently jumped on top of the old Pura X, which was an issue. She jumps on top of the new Pura Max, and that is an issue. The system things she is IN the box and thus records a toilet usage complete with cat weight. Why, well simple really, the scale doesn't know if she is in or on the drum, the cat weight is the same. So it then goes through a cleaning cycle, etc. The old Pura X hid the drum inside the box so when it cleaned, the hole opening rotated back and disappeared which sealed the litter off from the cat entering. In contrast, as the new Pura Max rotates backwards, the hole becomes this "cool opening on the top of my litter box that I want to investigate and jump into". That of course stops the box from rotating because it now detects extra mass, but still a big design flaw in my opinion. The entrance hole on the new Pura Max is bigger than the one on the old Pura X and it is also closer to the ground. I like the larger opening on the Pura Max, but it could also explain why I now notice the cat odor. Inside Drum Design: The old Pura X was an empty drum except for the silicone mat in the bottom that would billow up to ensure nothing stuck to it and a grate protected area for the clean litter to slide into. The new Pura Max has what I can only refer to as a poop slide in addition to the clean litter area with orange grate, which means it is an extra piece that is screwed in. The old Pura X just rotated so the poops/pees would just rotate until they dropped into a hole in the bottom and directly into the waste contains in the bottom. The new Pura Max rotates until the poops/pees drop onto the top of the slide and then as it rotates back they slide down the slide "weeeeee" and into a side waste container that swears it is sealed. It does have an articulating arm lid that goes up and down and supposedly acts as the "sealed" part of the description. Mine has some play in it, so it really isn't sealed so much as it is just covered. The waste container seems to hold more waste. My BIG complaint about the poop slide, is well, you can imaging what a poop slide looks like after poop slides down it. Sure the old Pura X slide the poop along the inside of the cylinder, but in the 1.5 yr I had it, I never saw poop streaks like I am seeing in the new Pura Max. Since the opening on the Pura Max is bigger, I think it is letting more of the odors out. Deodorizer: The old Pura X had a built in deodorizer unit in the base and deodorized the waste in the waste container and not the cat space of the litter box. The new Pura Max went a different route. I guess since the Pura X was not "sealed" and now the Pura Mas "is" they thought it would be better to put the deodorizer unit in the cat space. But it is not built in, it is a separate battery powered unit that pairs with the Pura Max to work with it. So after it cleans the deodorizer does its thing in the main cat space. It has the same features as the Pura X in term of scheduling etc. So now I have to watch the batteries in that unit, which is reported in the app. Does it work? Well, that is why I don't think I like this unit as well as the Pura X. My Pura X barely had a smell, this hits me when I walk in the room it is in. Same litter brand, sure there is a new kitten, but she has a separate litter box and we are working together to learn to use the "big girl box". So, the odor is coming from just my older cat really using it. And since it now records mass when the cat gets on top of the drum, I can't tell really how many times she actually goes anymore. Her standard is 3x a day. Now it is reporting 5-7x. I placed a camera on the box and have confirmed 3-4x she stands on top so it gives a false reading. Sensors: The Pura X had 3 sensors positioned around the opening to the drum. They worked. That is all I will say about that. They worked and worked well. The new Pura Max appears to use infrared and has one sensor below opening. I watching in horror today on the camera and my cat was in the box and it was in different states of rotation. My camera takes stills so I can't tell you if she was going for a ride or it stopped and she kept getting in and out. But now we are back to the issue of the "hole" staying accessible for over half of its rotation. Cleaning: The is where the new Pura Max wins. The old Pura X had to have the lid removed, the drum released and then you had to lift it out of the housing. The new Pura Max has a "access port" on the end where the deodorizer goes (it is actually so you can change the deodorizer, but it also allows for easy access for cleaning. The old Pura X had an option to dump all the unused litter into the container in the bottom making for easy emptying when it came time to change the litter. The new Pura Max does not have this because it has no bottom waste container. Instead you have to take the drum off and dump it out over a garbage can and then go get whatever vacuum you own to clean up the litter that is now all over the floor. The same opening that the old Pura X had to dump the pee balls into the bottom was the same opening that in its ready state would face up. This made it easy to dump litter into the drum. The new Pura Max doesn't have that. I had to watch a video and it only showed them using a small bag of litter that would easily fit inside for them to dump. I supposed you could take the drum off and use the end port to add the litter, I have not tried that yet. Instead I put the litter in a garbage bag and then put the garbage bag inside and slowly upended it and pulled it out. Calibration: Now here is where I had to email PetKit. For the old Pura X you had to take all the litter out so it was empty, and then in the app there was a calibrate button. This would zero the scale. Then you would add litter back in and when you had the max, you hit the "OK" button on the unit twice. It then would register that weight as 100% full. Cat weight was very accurate. The new Pura Max is different and here is an opportunity for the company to fix an issue. In the app for the Pura Max, there is no calibrate button per say. When you click on the icon of the litter box, a pop up shows up that says to fill with litter to the max and then double click the OK button and click calibrate. Here is the exact sentence: "Please click calibrate after finishing the step 1 & 2. The weighting scale with will accurate and the cat litters will be in full status" (they need an English speaker to write the english copy so it sounds more natural). The word calibrate in that sentence is blue. My first thought was to click it because online, most blue text are links, so I figured ok, this blue calibrate must do something. Clicking it did nothing, no confirmation, no acknowledgement, nothing. Calibration doesn't appear anywhere else in the app. So I emailed PetKit and they said the blue word calibrate does actually reset the scale but without any indication it is doing someone or is even successful. They need to fix that. My overall: If you have a Pura X, unless it is broken, don't try to replace it with this one. I am not sure you will like it. If you have never had the Pura X, well, I am biased so you will definitely like Pura Max better than your current litterbox. So my all 5 start review for Pura X is now a 3 star review for Pura Max. I hope this helps you decide. Since it can be returned, you don't have much to lose if you or your cat don't like it.