We checked which cat gear makers publish a wattage. Most do not.

To write our running-cost pages we needed one number from each mains-powered product: how much power it draws. We went to every manufacturer’s own product page. Here is what we found.

The results

What this means in practice

Two things, and the second is more interesting than the first.

First: nobody can tell you what most of this gear costs to run, including the people selling it. Every “energy efficient” claim in this category is unverifiable by the reader.

Second, and more usefully: where we could compute it, the answer was always small. The Litter-Robot ceiling is $24.10 a year assuming the motor runs continuously, which it does not. The PETLIBRO fountain ceiling is $8.03. So the honest conclusion is not “beware of hidden electricity costs” — it is that electricity does not matter in this category at all, and the consumables do.

A note on VA versus watts

Catit publishes 12 VA for the Flower Fountain. VA is apparent power at the adapter, not the power actually drawn, and converting between them requires a power factor nobody publishes. So we treat it as a hard ceiling — $19.28 a year if the fountain somehow drew its adapter’s full rating continuously — and say plainly that the real figure is lower and unpublished.

The same caution applies to the PETLIBRO figure: a 5 V / 1 A adapter caps draw at 5 W, but the pump almost certainly draws less. Every number on our running-cost pages is labeled as a ceiling where that is what it is.

Why we rank products on this

In a category with no independent testing, a manufacturer that publishes checkable numbers is giving you something a manufacturer that publishes adjectives cannot. That is why PETLIBRO leads our fountain roundup and why the Neakasa M1 leads our automatic box roundup — not because we have proven they perform better, but because they are the ones you can hold to account.

What would change this

Any of these makers could move to the top of one of our lists tomorrow by publishing a number. That is not a rhetorical offer — several products here are ranked below where their design probably deserves purely because their maker will not say how much waste the drawer holds or how much power the pump draws.

• A measured wattage, not an adapter rating. Even a typical figure with a stated test condition would be more than anyone currently offers.
• A drawer or reservoir capacity in liters or gallons. Neakasa and Casa Leo manage it; Whisker does not.
• A filter interval as a range, the way Pioneer Pet does, rather than a single number aimed at the single-cat case.
• A cat-count rating. The Litter-Robot 5 is the only unit in this category that publishes one, and it is the single most useful figure on the page.

Until then, the ranking rewards the makers who tell you things. It is the only quality signal available in a category with no independent testing, ours included.

That is the whole method, and it is what we do instead of claiming to have tested things we have not.