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High Dollar Litter Boxes and Their Odors

06/05/2010 by Martin | 1 comment

I was browsing the internet today and stumbled onto several websites that sell some really neat looking litter box covers. They were made of rattan, furniture finished wood, plastic and other interesting stuff to fit the décor of the room they are to be placed in.

Some had activated carbon filters or fans or an  automatic scooper. The prices where staggering, but if you want a litter box to look like furniture you have to pay the price. One was a 4 layer unit that looked like a bookcase except there were holes at the end of each shelf and it was $500 and it think you had to assemble it your self!

There was even special litter, odor sprays and scoops available but the bottom line was, as pretty and expensive as these cat box covers/hiders were, without real odor control they too will stink by the end of the week, even if you scoop them daily and we all know that cats really love clumping litter :-( .

The question remains, what odor control products will work and be safe for your cat and family? The answer is really simple…OdorXit Concentrate for the bottom of the litter pan and OdorXit Magic for the area above the litter.

Available on-line to most buyers and over the counter to people in the Southwest Ohio area, OdorXit Products are the ones you can depend on to keep your home smelling…not smelling at all! Once you try OdorXit you’ll know you finally found the right product.

The Real Scoop on Scoopable Litter

05/01/2010 by Martin | No comments

The Scoop on Litter

(as found on http://www.catsinternational.org/articles/housesoiling/the_scoop_on_litter.html)

Before the advent of kitty litter, cat boxes were filled with newspapers. Entrepreneur George Plitt came up with the idea of packaging ashes from burned wood for cats to use. The cat litter industry had its birth one day in 1947 when one of Edward Lowe’s neighbors who was tired of dealing with sooty paw prints, asked for some sand. Edward’s father owned an industrial absorbents company in Cassopolis, Michigan so instead of sand, Lowe suggested using absorbent clay. The neighbor loved the product and soon returned for more.

Realizing that he was on to a good thing, Lowe filled 10 small bags with ground clay, called it Kitty Litter and approached a local pet store. The shop owner was skeptical because sand was available for next-to-nothing and he doubted that anyone would pay 65 cents for a five-pound bag of Kitty Litter. “So give it away,” Ed told him. Soon customers were asking for more and were willing to pay for it. Lowe visited cat shows and traveled to pet stores across the country selling Kitty Litter from the back of his 1943 Chevy Coupe. By 1990, Edward Lowe Industries, Inc. was the nation’s largest producer of cat box filler with retail sales of more than $210 million annually.

The next major advance in cat box filler came in 1984 when Thomas Nelson, Ph.D., an enterprising biochemist, developed the first clumping litter. While studying organic chemistry, he investigated the molecular structure of clay. He discovered that some types of clay trapped urea through hydrogen bonding and prevented it from breaking down. Consequently, there was no offensive ammonia odor. He found that clays that were dried but not baked were very absorbent and would form a clump when the cat urinated on them. The clump could then be removed, thereby getting rid of the urine in the litter box and making the jobs of litter box cleaners everywhere much easier.

Between the two men, a wildly competitive and every-growing industry was spawned that is expected to bring in an astounding $765 million by 2003.

About 2001 a salesman called me at OdorXit Products and tried to convince me that he had the a permanent “spray on” deodorant for pet odor. I had a great deal of difficulty believing this claim but figured that since he was local and was giving product away I should give it a try.

As I had suspected it was not permanent, but it was very fast acting and effective for days and sometimes weeks per application, and when reapplied to the odorous area the odor disappeared for days to weeks again depending on the amount of product applied and the amount of odor being produced by the stuff causing the odor.

Well, since a big part of the OdorXit customer base at that time was real estate investors and rehabbers, I considered this temporary product to produce a prime opportunity to temporarily eliminate odors from a contaminated house so the property could be sold before the odor returned.  Fortunately, I underestimated the ethics of the vast majority of investors and rehabbers. Most preferred to use the more costly and labor intensive but permanent solution offered by OdorXit Concentrate

A larger segment of my customer base were people who simply had odors that would not respond to anything they could get over the counter at pet stores or hardware stores. Often the source of these odors were so inaccessible that they could not be effective treated with OdorXit Concentrate,  so OdorXit Magic was born.

So how does this connect with clumping cat litter?  Well, here is the link!

Clumping cat litter makes it easy for humans to remove smelly urine from a litter box. The catch is that it needs to be removed several times a day so that there is un-clumped litter available to the cat when they need to have a bowel movement. If there is no un-clumped litter available, the cat will either use another litter box (if one is available) or find another place to do their business (called house soiling).

The dilemma is easily solved with OdorXit Products and a covered litter box.

A covered litter box!!! My cat won’t use a covered litter box, they stink!

That’s right covered litter boxes do stink unless action is taken to control the odor inside the box and that action is so simple most people will not even consider it to be effective.  The solution is:

  • Replace your clumping litter with standard clay litter or even the course clay oil absorbents available at any auto parts store or Sam’s club for about $.15 per pound.  Just 4 quarts of litter are needed to fill a standard size litter box.
  • When changing the litter on garbage day and the box is empty, scrape any wet litter off the bottom with your litter scoop and  spray the bottom of the litter box with diluted OdorXit Concentrate (1 part concentrate 30 parts water). This will eliminate the urine odor on the bottom of the litter box that can not be washed away.
  • After the box has been refilled with fresh litter, spray the inside of the litter box cover with 4 squirts of OdorXit Magic (one on the inside of the top of the cover and 1 on each of the inside walls of the cover).  It is not necessary to spray the litter.
  • Fit the cover on the litter box and observe the difference. Your cat will dig in the litter and bury there feces and urine deposits just like they are supposed to do. Further you will notice that there was no odor escaping from the litter box.  And unless you are grossly over feeding your cat, the box will normally need to emptied only once a week.
  • If your cat has reservations about using the newly covered litter box, sprinkle a cup or 2 of “Cat Attract” litter (yes it’s clumping but with only 2 cups it doesn’t clump) to entice them to try the new box configuration.
  • Finally, the one litter box per cat plus 1 rule still applies.
CoveredLitterBox

Covered litterbox with card board dog excluder taped over the entrance

If you have a dog as well as a cat (like I do) and the dog likes to hunt for Tootsie Roles in the litter box, using a covered litter box will eliminate that problem too.

If the dog persists, you can make the entrance to the covered box too small for the dog with a piece of cardboard taped over the entrance. The hole needs to be  big enough for the cat but too small for the dog. It works great. If the dog is really insistent, you may have to use the latches on the cover as well to keep the pooch from lifting the cover off the box.

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