If you are being a good bunny parent and cleaning your rabbit’s litter boxes at least every two days (every day for rabbits over 5 lbs.), then you realize that one of the biggest daily expenses of keeping an indoor pet rabbit is the absorbent material that you put into their boxes to soak up their urine. Whether you use CareFresh® or wood pellets, throwing out a litter box full of the stuff adds up and can easily cost $20-40 a month per litter box.
Having several rabbits or litter boxes can multiply the expense and I will share with you how my wife, Denise has learned to save about 75 percent of our CareFresh bill on the four litter boxes that we clean each day. It will cost you less than $20 to get enough material to work for four or five litter boxes and you will save enough CareFresh® to pay for it the first month (or purchase one already made from The Bunny Guy Store).
Go to your local hardware store and find the honeycomb plastic grating that goes into suspended overhead lighting fixtures. Actually, any kind of metal or plastic grating will work, but metal grates will get eaten up by the caustic rabbit urine and plastic will not. The kind we buy is used in lighting fixtures and is easily cut to size with a diagonal wire cutter or wire snippers. Since it comes in 2X6 foot sizes, cut a couple extra grates and give them to your bunny friends. They will hug you for it when they see how much it saves them.
If you prefer not to make your own or are not handy with tools, then you can purchase one of these grates that I have made by clicking this link to visit my store.
After we have lined the cleaned litter box with the usual absorbent material, the grating is placed on top. Then the box is filled to overflowing with the hay. Don’t skimp on the hay and you will find that y our rabbit will eat more hay. They like to forage and pick out the good parts, so the more hay you give them, the more good stuff they will find to eat.
When your rabbit digs down into the hay in their box, they will not disturb the absorbent layer under the grate. This means that when you go to clean their box, you will find that they always pee into one corner. You will be able to scoop out the wet absorbent material, dump the rest that has not gotten wet with urine into another box or bucket and then clean the litter box with vinegar and water (this prevents the buildup up those white calcium deposits).
You will discover that you will be saving 75 percent of the absorbent material each time you clean the box and another added benefit will be that your rabbit will not get those yellow stained feet from standing in his pee.
This is just one of dozens of bunny secrets I share in my new book, The Bunny Lover’s Complete Guide To House Rabbits available from my store on this site.
Everyone that I have shown this trick to has come back and thanked me for it. Hope you find it useful, too.
The Bunny Guy