Finally, a great silica litter
by - Written: Oct 11 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Less prone to getting kicked around; low odor; doesn't hurt feet; no perfume
Cons: Still gets kicked around a bit
The Bottom Line: We'll be sticking with Fresh Step Crystals!
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| owling's Full Review: Fresh Step Crystals |
11 months ago we brought home two adorable Cornish Rex kittens. The breeder had strongly recommended silica crystal cat litter, so we had decided to go with that. (I've used clumping clay litter with other cats in the past.) There are plenty of varieties, however, and it has taken us all 11 months to settle on a favorite.
Advantages of Silica
Silica simply adsorbs liquid, odor, and all straight into the little crystals - very quickly. The cat box looks better, and in my experience smells better. The lack of liquid also helps to inhibit bacterial growth. You can tell when the litter needs to be changed because the majority of the crystals become opaque white or yellow, and you can start to smell the urine a little. There's also less dust to breathe than with the clay litters I used to use.
It lasts for quite a while. The advertised capacity is that one 4-lb bag will last one cat one month. This decreases substantially when you have multiple cats, however. We have two extra-large litter pans in the house (one upstairs, one downstairs); each one takes two such bags at a time and lasts for about 2 weeks. (If your cats use the boxes unequally then they'll last for unequal times. Sometimes we have to change the upstairs box about once a week or so, and the downstairs one closer to once every three weeks.)
Obviously you still have to be good about scooping solid waste out once a day. We use the (very handy) "Scoop & Bag" available from petfooddirect.com - a scoop with a hollow handle that feeds down into a ziploc bag. It makes dealing with this part of things easy and quick. You can also find scoops with holes in them sized specially for the pearl varieties of silica litter.
When your cats are raised on the stuff, there's no problem - our kittens loved silica litter. The breeder said it was safer because they were less likely to get dust in their eyes as kittens. I gather that the easiest way to adjust a cat to new litter if you want to switch over is to gradually, batch by batch, mix a little more of the silica litter into your clay litter every time, until you've switched them over entirely.
None of the brands of silica litter we've tried have had perfume in them - thank goodness! With our allergies, I'd never buy a litter with perfume in it.
The Brands We've Tried
First we tried Fresh Magic - the round "pearl" kind. It worked just fine as a litter, but the cats kicked it out of the litter pan (despite the high sides) fairly easily. It was light, after all, and the smooth round surface meant that it moved easily. Crystal Clear pearls seemed roughly equivalent.
Next we tried Fresh Magic's "trackless" variety - a sort of chunky crystal-like structure instead of round pearls. It was only a little better as far as getting kicked out of the box and tracked around the house went, and its sharp edges were a lot worse to step on (not so bad in carpet, but murder if you step on them on hard floors).
After that we tried ExquisiCat's pearl variety, which comes in plastic jugs instead of bags. Again, it worked just fine as a litter, but it gets kicked around a lot.
Oh, I must note that there's one other significant problem with the pearl-shaped varieties of silica litter. If a piece ends up on a hard-surfaced floor and one of our cats sees it rolling around, they'll think it's a toy and try to play with it. This, since our little girl (Selene) will eat anything as long as it isn't food, has occasionally resulted in her chewing on a litter pearl. Not such a good idea! (When this happens, try to hold the cat still, grab a soaking wet washcloth, drip lots of water over the pearl - which by now is sticking to any exposed wet tissues - and then gently remove it.) We've never had this kind of trouble with crystal-style silica litters.
Finally we tried Fresh Step crystals. (The almost-local BJ's Warehouse carries them in bulk.) It functions just fine as a litter. As for getting kicked around - well, the advantage it has is that the pieces are significantly smaller than those of the other brands, and they aren't round. Far fewer end up on the floor, and they're much less noticeable when we step on them! Survey says, Fresh Step is the winner.
Using the Crystals
My only complaint is that where I get them, Fresh Step crystals come in a huge plastic bucket, so I can't just say, "okay, two bags per box, toss 'em in." I solved this by keeping a couple of the Exquisicat jugs and using them to measure the crystals out. I find that one 10-lb bucket is not quite enough for two extra-large litter boxes. (I guess the Fresh Step brand is lighter than the others, since with Fresh Magic it took 8 pounds per box.)
The one complaint I've had about silica crystals is that the bottom layer of them tends to get soaked through. This is fine if your litter box liner holds. But if your cats scratch through the bottom of the liner a little (ahem), then despite spiffy litter and plastic liner you'll still have to clean the litter box when some of the liquid leaks through. You can solve this by diligently stirring up all of the crystals every day... or so the directions say. In practice I've found that this never actually soaks up all the stuff from the bottom, and it means that the box gets a lot smellier and "used up" much faster.
Overall I love silica litters. Both our little boy (Cahlash) and my mother's male cat (Pete) leave particularly stinky presents, you see, due to illness troubles. Mom uses the clumping litter, and it took her forever to find a solution that would keep her house from smelling. We use the silica litter, and as long as the waste gets covered up the odor fades very quickly. The only trick was finding a way to keep the litter from ending up all over the house, and the Fresh Step crystals do a reasonably good job of that!
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This review is part of the Eps kids Big Payoff Challenge. Dear Home & Garden folks: Us Books people will rescue the Eps kids! You can't have them! So there! :)
Recommended:
Yes
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