Three cats. Three trays. Thirty minutes a day. The smell still won, so I gave up on clumping litter
Now one change a month, for all three. Forty-five seconds per tray per day. The flat smells of nothing — even when friends turn up unannounced. Here's how.
The old hell, three-cat edition
Right, listen.
I run a small cat rescue. Trapping. Fostering. Rehoming. I've had households of four, five, sometimes six cats at once in foster care, and three permanently at home with me. So when I tell you that I know what it's like to deal with several litter trays at the same time, I know it the hard way.
For seven years, I used clumping clay litter for my three. The premium stuff. The budget stuff. The one with activated charcoal. The one called "multi-cat formula" (which is never actually multi-cat anything). The one with scented crystals that smell like a hotel lobby having an identity crisis.
Here's why I stopped.
The smell that won anyway.
I scooped morning and evening. I did a full change-out every three days. The smell came back every time.
Friends would ring the buzzer and I'd see their face the second they walked in. That polite half-smile. They could smell it. I could smell it. Everyone pretended otherwise.
Thirty minutes a day. Every single day.
Ten minutes per tray. Three trays. Thirty minutes a day, every day, no exceptions.
Three and a half hours of my life every week. Scooping cat wee. Multiplied by fifty-two weeks, that's seven and a half full days a year. Scooping cat wee.
I did the maths once and sat down on the floor. My cats found this very interesting.
A full change-out every three days.
With three cats, you can't make it to a week. By day three it's grim. By day four, it's your guests who leave first.
So a deep clean of all three trays twice a week, plus The Sunday.
I called Sundays The Sunday. Capital T, capital S — it earned it.
A 10kg bag. Every ten days.
Not every fortnight like for one cat. Every ten days. From the supermarket to the boot of the car, from the car to the flat, from the doorway to the cupboard. Each bag weighs about the same as a toddler. Except you don't have to repurchase the toddler every ten days.
The lad on the till started recognising me. He got into the habit of saying "see you in ten days, then." Not a good sign.
£45 to £60 a month. Bare minimum.
Big-format clumping litter. Anti-smell sprays. Scented candles. Charcoal sachets. And the trays themselves — replaced twice a year because they were stained beyond saving.
That's around £600 a year. For a flat that still smelled of cat.
Grains. Everywhere. × 3.
Under the sofa. In the kitchen. In the shower. In my bed (yes).
One Sunday evening I found a grain in my mug of tea. The following Tuesday, in the bottom of a crisp packet. The Friday after that, under my boyfriend's pillow. He did not take that well. I'm not joking.
The hoover had basically moved in next to the trays. It was living its own life over there.
Three pours. Three dust clouds.
Every bag you tip out is a cloud. Times three. That's three windows to open, three times a month.
My dark furniture next to the trays was visibly grey by the second week.
The cement at the bottom. Three times over.
Clumping clay almost never de-clumps the way the bag promises. It hardens over time. Like cement, but worse — because the cement is, in fact, wee.
On Sundays I'd scrape three tray bottoms. With a scraper. With a kitchen knife. Once — and I swear this is true — with a tablespoon. The same tablespoon I had my soup with. Washed properly, mind. Still.
Three trays. My downstairs neighbours could hear me scraping. The neighbour upstairs eventually banged on his floor.
That was my life. For seven years.
Then I stopped.
The breaking point
The exact day I stopped was a Sunday last March.
I was on my knees. I had the scraper. I had the tablespoon in reserve. I was halfway through the second tray out of three — my hands smelled of ammonia, I could taste the dust at the back of my throat, and my three cats, the three traitors, were watching me with the face cats pull when they think you're making a bit of a meal of it.
And I just stopped.
I sat down on the bathroom tiles next to the half-cleaned second tray and said, out loud, to no one: I can't do this any more. I am never doing this again. Not three times over.
That was it. No lightning bolt. Just the realisation that there was still a tray waiting after this one — and that I was done.
The discovery
A few months before The Sunday, I'd stumbled across a short article in aufeminin (a French women's magazine) about a French silica-crystal cat litter. The promise: one bag, one tray, thirty days. No top-ups. No changes. No intervention. No smell.
I read it. I rolled my eyes. Sure, I thought. Thirty days. With three cats. One of them an un-neutered male, by the way. Sure. I forgot about the article within the hour.
After my Sunday on the bathroom floor, I remembered it.
A box on my doormat a few days later.
The first thing — the very first thing, before I'd even opened anything — was that the bags were light. All three of them. Light enough to lift between two fingers. After seven years of carrying 10kg bricks back from the supermarket every ten days, I nearly cried on the front step.
Day 1: the first pour
I emptied my three old trays (one last Sunday with the tablespoon, for old times' sake), wiped them, and poured Pacha into each one. About 5cm deep across the bottom of each tray. The crystals look like coarse white sand. They make a clean, neat sound as they fall.
No dust cloud. Three trays. Not one.
I checked. I genuinely waved my hand over each tray to be sure. Nothing. My dark furniture next to the trays stayed dark — for the first time in seven years.
My three cats came to inspect in under sixty seconds. The first one in forty. The second in fifty. The third one in two minutes because he was asleep. Each one sniffed, each one looked at me, and then they just… used their trays. As if they'd been waiting their whole lives for someone to finally get it.
I was waiting for the catch.
The 30-day × 3-cat test
I'll be honest, I never bought the "lasts a month" thing. With three cats, I gave it three days, tops, before I'd be back on the tiles with the tablespoon.
Here's what actually happened:
Poured into all three trays. No dust. All three cats give it the nod. The flat smells of nothing. I remain suspicious.
The clumping-litter danger zone. The day it always started to pong, before. Still no smell. I go and sniff each tray one by one. My boyfriend watches in silence.
Still nothing. I'm now leaning over each tray and inhaling on purpose to check. My boyfriend is concerned.
My sister pops round (nose like a bloodhound, this one). Not a word about a smell. She actually asks me, with a straight face, whether I've rehomed one of the cats because she "can't smell him at all". I nearly choke on my wine.
My new daily routine: scoop the solids out of three trays, give the crystals a stir to aerate. Forty-five seconds a tray. Two minutes total for all three. I've timed it because I genuinely can't believe my own life.
All three bags are due. Changeover day.
And this is where I'm stopping the list — because what happens next is the bit I want to show you in full. The bit that used to ruin my Sundays, threefold. The bit I still can't quite believe, eleven months on. It deserves its own section. Step by step.
Keep scrolling. You need to see this.
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Claim the Halloween offer →The changeover × 3
Right. Here's the full thing, for all three trays.
I've now been doing this monthly routine for eleven months. No magic. No exaggeration. Just my Tuesday morning, eleven months in.
Step 1. Empty all three trays.
A whole month's tray-load slides straight into a bin bag. No dust cloud. No windows to open. No holding my breath like a hostage.
Three times. Like it's nothing. Like emptying sand out of a bucket.
Before, I needed a full chemical-hazard protocol for this bit. Times three, it was starting to feel like a Breaking Bad lab.
Step 2. Look at the bottom of the three trays.
This is the bit I want you to really look at.
Nothing stuck. Nothing crusted. Nothing welded to the base. No cement. No grey patches. Three trays as clean as the day they came out of the packaging.
Last year, this is where I lost two hours every Sunday. On my knees. With a metal scraper. For three trays.
Step 3. One spritz per tray. A wipe. Done.
One spritz of cleaning spray per tray, one pass with kitchen roll, and all three are clean.
No bicarb. No overnight soak. No carrying anything to the shower. No emergency with six buckets of water (because with three trays, it was six buckets — yes, I've lived that life).
A minute and a half per tray. Four and a half minutes total. Instead of two hours.
Step 4. All three trays still look new.
Eleven months I've been using these same three trays. They look the same age as the day I bought them.
My old trays were yellowing on the base by month three. I used to replace them twice a year, three at a time, because they were stained beyond use.
Eleven months. The same three trays. Like nothing ever happened.
Step 5. Open all three fresh bags. Two fingers.
All three. Embarrassingly light, every time.
I'm still not over it.
Step 6. Pour. No dust. Three times.
About 5cm deep across the bottom of each tray. The crystals make that same clean, neat sound as they fall. Three times in a row.
I check every single time. I hold my hand above each tray. Nothing in the air. There is never anything in the air.
Step 7. All three cats are already in their trays.
I haven't even finished levelling the crystals in the third one.
They do this every single time. They always win.
Step 8. Total time for all three trays: twelve minutes.
Last year, this same job took me two hours. Six buckets of water. A scalding shower to get over it. A glass of wine. And a general feeling of existential defeat that lasted until Monday morning.
This year, it took me less time than cooking pasta for two. My boyfriend actually asked if I'd forgotten something. No. I was done.
Now multiply that by twelve.
That's my entire year of three-cat cleaning.
Reader, the promises held. Three times over.
Why it actually works
I'm not a chemist. I'm a woman who has spent twelve years up to her elbows in cat litter, several trays at a time. So I'll keep it short.
It all comes down to one letter: the difference between absorbed and adsorbed. Two completely different bits of physics.
✕ Clumping clay — absorbed
The water, the ammonia and the smell are sucked in together, mixed into one wet soup.
When the water evaporates, the smell comes back out with it — straight into your kitchen, your hallway, your nose. And it gets worse over time: wet surface = bacteria = ammonia. × 3 trays.
✓ Pacha — adsorbed
The smell molecules stay locked one by one inside the pores of each crystal. Each one has its own parking space.
Only water evaporates. The surface stays dry — so no bacteria, no fresh ammonia. Hour one looks the same as day thirty.
What happens when your cat wees on Pacha
- The odour molecules are pulled into the pores of the crystal and stay stuck there, one by one — parked until you throw the bag out, thirty days later.
- The water, which no longer carries any smell, evaporates freely — like a puddle drying in the sun.
- The surface stays dry: bacteria have nowhere to live. No bloom, no fresh ammonia. The smell never gets worse — for any of the three trays.
Smell parked. Water gone. Surface dry. Bacteria starved. No Sunday.
It's not magic. It's just better physics — with a bit of biology thrown in.
The thing I didn't see coming
About three months in, something happened that I really hadn't seen coming.
I was doing my morning scoop (two minutes for all three trays). Boring. Routine. And then I clocked it: the crystals in one corner of one of the three trays had turned blue. Not the other two. Just one.
I went back to the little leaflet that came with the bag. A colour change can flag a possible urinary issue — the crystals are transparent and white, so they show what dark clumping litter hides completely.
I worked out which of the three was using that tray most (mine each have a favourite). I took that one to the vet that same afternoon. Caught early. £40 of antibiotics. Sorted.
Here's what that means in a multi-cat home: with three cats sharing the same clumping litter, I'd probably never have spotted it — the smell of the three blends together, you can't tell whose is whose. With three Pacha trays, I could see which tray had the issue. So which cat.
I'm a cat rescue volunteer, not a vet, and Pacha isn't a diagnostic tool. It's a safety net between vet visits, not a diagnosis. If you see a colour change, take your cat to the vet to confirm.
But in twelve years of rescue work with multi-cat homes, I've never once seen a cat litter actively help me work out which of three cats had a problem. Not once.
The new normal × 3
It's now been eleven months.
Things I haven't done in eleven months:
- Hauled a 10kg bag back from the supermarket every ten days
- Scraped the bottom of a tray with a tablespoon (× 3)
- Hoovered under the sofa to pick up grains
- Held my breath while emptying a litter tray
- Done a full change-out every three days
- Apologised to a guest for the smell
- Spent a whole Sunday on my knees in front of three trays
- Bought a single anti-smell spray, scented candle or charcoal sachet
Things I have done:
- Spent about two minutes a day on three trays
- Spotted a urinary issue in time — and known which of my three cats had it
- Become slightly unbearable on the subject of this litter at every cat-people gathering I attend
That last one's on me. Working on it.
I'm not a one-off
I thought maybe I'd just got lucky with my three. Or that mine were unusually easygoing. Or that my sense of smell was knackered.
Then I read the reviews. There are over 7,500 now. A lot of them come from multi-cat homes. The same words come up again and again: no dust, no smell, no scraping, I can't believe it — even with several cats.
I'm not a special case. I'm just one of the louder ones.
What other multi-cat households say
"Having been sceptical at first this really works. I have three cats and two weeks in it's delivering on its promises. Not cheap but worth every penny."
"As the owner of two fifteen-year-old house cats I began to notice the litter tray beginning to smell after a couple of days and was therefore changing the litter completely 3 or 4 times a week. Initially I thought it was too good to be true… It's brilliant and works exactly as described, after 5 days the litter is still fresh and both cats use it without fuss. One very happy customer and 2 very happy cats."
"I was reserved because it was more expensive than my regular clumping litter, but that extra £5 a month has bought back hours of my life from cleaning trays and carpets! We store our litter furniture in the spare room and it was smelling the upstairs… NOT anymore, you wouldn't even know we have a cat!"
"Amazing stuff! No smell! Doesn't track through the house. Urine is colour coded. Already spotted an issue with one of my cats — urine too alkaline. And a simple stir and all the urine is soaked up and disappears!"
Verified Trustpilot reviews. Reflect the individual experience of their authors and do not guarantee identical results.
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If you're still reading
If you've made it this far, you're either (a) someone who cleans several litter trays and has had enough, or (b) my mum, who I made promise to read to the end. Hi Mum.
For everyone in category (a):
Pacha is delivered to your door once a month, in the right quantity for the number of cats you have. No commitment. Cancel whenever you want, no phone call, no guilt trip. The first bag is 20% off, and if it doesn't blow you away, you get a full refund — no need to send the bag back. Keep it, walk away.
I know what you're thinking. "Leaving the same litter for thirty days with SEVERAL cats? That's impossible." I thought the same thing. But the smell stays locked inside the crystals and the water evaporates — so there's no puddle, no smell pocket, nothing sitting there festering. Even with three. Honestly, it's cleaner than what you're doing right now. I promise.
The other thing I know you're thinking: "Pacha for several cats is going to cost me a fortune."
Let's be honest for a minute. A bag of Pacha is around £21. At the supermarket, you can find clumping clay litter at £4 a bag. You can even find budget silica gel at around £9. Bag for bag, Pacha is more expensive. That's just true.
Now the real maths. The one you never do at the till.
Pacha vs clumping clay at £4 a bag. With my three on clumping, I was doing a full change-out every three days. Plus the anti-smell sprays. Plus the candles. Plus the charcoal sachets. Plus two replacement trays a year, because they were beyond saving. My monthly spend was in the £45-£60 range — for a flat that still smelled of cat. Pacha across three trays sits in the same range. Except I haven't bought a single candle in eleven months. Not a spray. Not a sachet. Not a replacement tray. My one-woman air-freshener shop has gone bust. Good riddance.
Pacha vs budget supermarket silica at £9 a bag. This one's more subtle. I tried one before — supermarket, looked promising. Week one, brilliant. Week two, the smell was creeping back. The bag didn't last thirty days for a single cat — let alone three. I ended up rebuying sooner than promised, and the smell stuck around anyway. I saw a review that summed it up: she was paying around £20 a week for budget silica from a high-street brand; with Pacha that's £21 for two weeks across two cats. Budget silica almost always lasts less than the bag claims. The maths catches up fast.
There are a few negative reviews where people have missed a key point. If you have several cats sharing ONE tray, the bag won't last thirty days. More like fifteen. The rule that works in a multi-cat home is one bag per tray, not one bag per cat. With my three on three trays, the month holds. Do your maths with that in mind, not against the headline promise.
And the maths nobody does. The three and a half hours a week I no longer spend scooping. That one doesn't go on a spreadsheet. But still. That's seven full days of my life a year. Back in my pocket.
Your next monthly deep-clean is booked in for this Sunday. Three trays. (Or four. Or five.)
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Frequently asked questions
Will my cat take to Pacha?
The vast majority of cats take to Pacha within 24 to 72 hours. No chemical smell, no dust, soft texture under the paws — it puts the cat at ease.
If you'd prefer a gentle transition: mix Pacha with your current litter for 3 to 5 days, gradually increasing the proportion. Tip: place a small clump of your cat's old litter into the Pacha tray to help them recognise the spot.
Is silica gel safe?
Pacha uses amorphous silica gel (SiO₂) — the same inert material as the little absorbent sachets you find in shoeboxes. Not to be confused with crystalline silica, which is a completely different industrial material. Non-toxic, used in many everyday products.
Does a bag really last a month?
Yes, for one cat. Pour the whole bag into the tray, scoop out the solids each day, and give the crystals a gentle stir to spread the absorption. Full change once a month — that's it.
Several cats: one bag per tray, per month. For a particularly large cat (Maine Coon, urinary issues), you can switch to a 3-week delivery in two clicks.
How does Pacha control odours?
The silica crystals are porous and highly absorbent: they soak up urine and dry out solid waste. With no moisture, the bacteria responsible for bad smells can't develop.
Daily upkeep is just two moves: scoop the solids, stir the crystals.
What about the dust?
Pacha is virtually dust-free thanks to a patented filtration process developed with vets. The floor stays clean, and the risk of respiratory discomfort for the family and for the cat is greatly reduced.
Do the crystals stick to paws?
No. Pacha crystals are shaped into rounded ovals during manufacturing, dry and light. They don't stick between the pads like the wet clay of clumping litter. A mat at the front of the tray catches the few crystals that might track out.
Is it more expensive than my current litter?
Do the maths over a full month. With ordinary litter, you change the tray once or twice a week and rebuy regularly. With Pacha, a single bag covers the whole month — one Pacha bag replaces up to 4 bags of ordinary litter. The monthly cost is usually comparable, sometimes lower.
Is Pacha suitable for every cat?
Yes: neutered or not, male or female, kitten, adult or senior, every breed (Maine Coon, Persian, Siamese, British Shorthair, European, Bengal, Ragdoll, Sphynx and many more).
How does delivery work?
Pacha is delivered automatically to your door every month. No more lugging bags home from the shops. Frequency adjustable in two clicks, pause any time.
No commitment. Change, delay or cancel your subscription in seconds from your account.
Can I order a single bag to try it?
No, Pacha only comes as a subscription. But there's no commitment: you can edit, delay or cancel online in 2 minutes from your account. And if you're not happy within 30 days, your first bag is free.
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