SodaStream Economics
priceonomics.com
priceonomics.com
At a welding supply shop, they'll sell you a 5lb tank of CO2 (around $60 initially, then $15-20 for each refill thereafter). If you then go to a homebrew supply store, you can buy a CO2 regulator (~$70, depending on quality), the appropriate tubing and a ball-lock adapter (< $10), and a carbonator cap ($15, something like http://morebeer.com/view_product/18250/). That setup'll let you take any plastic soda bottle (1-liter, 2-liter, whatever) and carbonate it directly. I have a CO2 tank for kegging my home-brewed beer and soda, and I frequently use my carbonator cap to make small test batches of soda before mixing up a full five gallon batch in a keg.
A 5lb tank of CO2 will last for 15-20 5-gallon kegs of beer. There's no easy apples-to-apples comparison (soda is more highly carbonated than beer, and I'm not sure of the effect on efficiency from carbonating such small batches), but any way you work it paying $15-20 for a refill is a much better deal than paying for SodaStream cartridges.
In the Bay Area, Carbonic Service in Santa Clara are GREAT -- if you walk in and tell them you want to make soda, they will hook you up with a 5 lb tank and a fill, and a pre-made-up combo with tubing, regulator and ball-lock valve, along with the screw-top adaptor for the 2L bottle.
What you're thinking of is the CO2 used for propulsion in gas driven guns like BB's, pellets, and paint-balls. This gas often has synthetic oil mixed in to keep the moving parts of the guns lubricated.
TL;DR: Welding shop good, paint-ball shop bad.
I bought a CO2 delivery service business in college that was a sideline of my friends dad's business. He was buying tankercars of CO2 for welding to get a lower price and then selling his "cheap" CO2 to bars.
I get a discount for trading in my old cartridge? A single cartridge lasts me 3 months. We make 2 bottles per day.
The standard price is $15, I always buy them at Bed Bath and Beyond with a 20% off coupon ... which makes them $10. Ten bucks for 3 months isn't bad.
"Higher carbonation levels may be reached with the Fizz Giz carbonator. More effective carbonation is achieved through agitation during the process. Kitchen countertop units do not allow you to agitate bottles while carbonating. You simply can't mix the CO2 effectively without agitation. The big soda bottling companies know this. Our competitors know this. But since you can't pick up their machine and shake it, they downplay this important fact. One of the biggest consumer complaints by those with countertop carbonators is disappointment with low carbonation levels achieved."
I make flavors for electronic cigarettes, so I have been considering making them for this or a sort of Mio alternative. If anyone wants to beta test some flavors, please contact me.
For comparison, my home carbonator (AGA, not SodaStream, but same principle) has a huge 425g cartridge that yields about 60 liters of carbonated water.
In other words, it takes about 7g of CO2 to saturate a liter of water (probably more as these countertop machines aren't very effective at saturating the water), meaning 16g should give you barely in excess of 2 liters of carbonated water. That's more or less how much I consume in a day.
I wonder how difficult it would be to reduce a CO2 collection device to the size of a coffeemaker.
One small glass of water is about 1/4 liter. A pint glass is nearly double that. So if you drink one pint glass of water per day, that's already far beyond what they're calling "frequent".
And of course, the above is based on a person who lives alone. If there's more than one person in your household, it pays off even faster.
The project on my to-do list (please don't do this unless you know what you're doing) is to cut the top off of an expired SodaStream cylinder and fashion it into an adaptor for the hose from my 5 lb. CO2 tank. 5 lbs. of CO2 will yield something like 500 L of carbonated water, at the same $15 per fill as the SodaStream 60L refills. This should bring the cost down to $0.05 per liter or less. SodaStream will still get my money for their soda syrups, but I can disintermediate their highway-robbery CO2 service.
The canisters look aluminum, so welding would probably be difficult - aluminum is supposedly very difficult to weld, and welding different types of metal is very difficult as well. The easiest way might be to put the canister's nozzle on a tube.
My plan is to tap out the inside of the tank valve and thread in an adaptor. If it works, I'll post it on Instructables...
(edit: better link is http://co2doctor.com/freedomoonespec.htm )
""" The “Diet Coke” was a bit of a disaster. Not only was the “fake” easily identifiable, but it tasted pretty bad. No one on the team would be happy to have the homemade version replace our real Diet Coke, no matter how much money we saved. """
Non-sugary flavors are an acquired taste, since we aren't evolved to drink them. Diet Coke tastes bad, at first. (As does coffee, beer, etc). Your brain rejects the unusual flavor, as a poison-prevention reflex. If you don't die, you get accustomed to the flavor (and maybe develop a flavor->caffeine-buzz associaton that makes the taste feel perkier)
If you have been drinking Diet Coke for a long time, you just don't remember how bad the first one tasted.
6-packs of sparkling water bottles make our SodaStream look much cheaper than the analysis in the article. The SodaStream device itself was reasonably cheap too, I don't remember how much, but no more than 40 GBP. Overpriced for the simple mechanism it is, but kept our hands clean.
We do not generally use the SodaStream flavours. They're almost all horrible. The cola tastes like cola-flavoured penny sweets, and of course to achieve the concentrations required they need to use artificial sweeteners even for non-diet versions. They're all too sweet. The one product they sell that's any good - MyWater, and specifically the lemon-lime essence bottle in the three-pack - has been out of stock for the past 6 months in the UK.
We use the sparkling water for the things that we used to use store-bought for - watering down fruit juices, which are almost invariably 10% sugar in the UK from grape or apple juice filler, and for use with other commercially bought fruit and fruit squash concentrates.
Solved if you use Fizz-keeper pump caps. This helps put the bottle back up to pressure after it's been opened so that the water doesn't go flat doing the same job.
We used to use these ~30 years ago when we had a Sodastream (I still have memories of going to John Lewis to get refilled cartridges).
With the SodaStream, I envisioned being able to take the bottles I do buy (and didn't toss) and reuse them for the SoadStream... always knowing that if I wanted to, I didn't have to keep track of the refilled bottle when I was done. Maybe I'm lazy or selfish for not wanting to keep track of an empty, reusable bottle... so be it. But I like the convenience of the option to toss the bottle when I'm done.
I also wish the article had some numbers on life expectancy of the machine. Its all fine and dandy to accept the reality of needing 4yrs for the machine to pay for itself... until you discover that it failed before then.
Based on my expected use pattern (both refilling AND buying new) I doubt my machine would last long enough to break even.
The sugary flavors are garbage. The fruity "essential oil" type of stuff (probably the stuff you are drinking) are fine.
Of course, YMMV, but I've had one going on 5 years now without a problem.
Money wasted.
For that matter, if you are dead-set on real Coke, you can buy bag-in-box syrups from your local distributor (or convince a neighborhood restauarant owner to sell one to you) and have real Coke products for less than SodaStream charges -- but you have to be willing to store the larger box and decant from it into something you can keep in your kitchen.
I almost always prefer drinking my own home-made soda to store-bought stuff, but I've given up completely on trying to formulate a recipe for a cola that tastes even remotely like people think cola should.
If you're deadset on making cola with a SodaStream, I'd go to a commercial restaurant distributor and get your hands on a box of real Coke or Diet Coke syrup.
Not at all. I brew my own cola at home using the OpenCola [1] recipe -- and speaking as a person who is very picky about colas, I find it delicious, easily on par with store-bought Coke -- which you could easily produce on a large scale.
The recipe is very close to the original Coca-Cola recipe; the Coca-Cola Company now presumably uses synthetic flavours in place of the various oils, which means the homebrew version actually tastes much more fresh and natural compared to store-bought Coke.
(I will admit Homebrew Coke lacks a little bit of the "bite" of Coca-Cola, which might come from the coca leaf.)
I use a SodaStream-style home carbonator, but it's not great. Store-bought soda water is much better.
As a city dweller who doesn't usually take a car to the grocery store, I don't usually buy more than a few liters of liquid at a time. I like drinking carbonated water, but I don't want to lug it home, and I don't want to have to store it in my small-ish kitchen.
I wonder what percent of consumers I'm in. 3? 5? Maybe not enough to matter, but I bet even many car-driving consumers don't like carrying a big case of soda.
I've also taken to getting sugar free flavors from Torani and mixing them with other flavors. I love cream soda + vanilla bean + strawberry. The combinations are virtually endless.