I spent a morning at a dog boarding facility outside Hangzhou — the kind that takes eighty dogs over Spring Festival. The owner walked me through rows of cages from four different suppliers purchased across five years. Different latch types on different units. A new hire had left a door unsecured because the latch mechanism on that particular cage was different from the other eleven in the row. Husky got out. Nobody hurt, but recapture took two hours. The owner said, “I need every cage to work the same way.”
The P9 is a three-floor, twelve-door dog kennel — twelve compartments in one welded frame, four per floor. Compartments come in mixed sizes because a boarding facility isn’t housing twelve identical breeds: outer compartments on each floor are larger, about ninety by seventy centimeters, for Labs and Goldens. Inner compartments are about seventy-five by sixty-five, for Corgis and Frenchies. That mixed sizing means one row handles breed diversity without separate “big dog” and “small dog” cage banks.
Every door uses the same latch — two-point slide bolt, top and bottom, identical across all twelve compartments. When a kennel tech is cleaning twelve compartments at shift end on autopilot, the latch shouldn’t require thinking. Oversized handles — gloved hands, wet hands, cold hands at 6 AM. I’ve watched kennel staff try to work small latches with winter-numb fingers and it’s miserable.
304 stainless, all welded, floor-anchored. At twelve compartments loaded, the unit is heavy enough that anchoring isn’t optional — brackets ship for concrete or wood subfloor. Stainless hardware, no galvanized bolts rusting against the frame.
Compartment floors are solid stainless trays with a two-degree slope toward a front drain channel feeding an external collection pipe. Connect to facility drainage with standard PVC. If your building has no floor drains, the pipe terminates in a catch basin you empty manually — functional, though not ideal for twelve dogs.
Between compartments: solid stainless dividers, not mesh. A reactive dog in compartment four can’t make eye contact with compartment five and escalate. Urine doesn’t splash through during hose-down. Noise transmission is lower than through mesh, and noise is the biggest stressor in a boarding environment. Reducing bark propagation reduces overall ward noise, which reduces stress barking further. Solid dividers start the feedback loop moving in the right direction.
The P9 is not for small clinics. Twelve compartments is infrastructure for a substantial boarding operation, a large hospital’s hospitalization ward, or a shelter intake room. Ships on two pallets — forklift required. Assembly is bolt-together from pre-welded sub-frames: two people, one full day. Once anchored, it’s not moving without a demolition plan. Send me your floor plan and I’ll work out the layout that maximizes capacity without dead-end cleaning corridors.
