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Soda Siphon - anyone use one?

15 years ago

My husband mentioned that he thought a soda siphon would be a good thing to have. Soda water and lemon or lime or cranberry and soda are what we usually drink in the summer. What kind do you have? Do you use it a lot? Or is it one of those things that ends up to be more trouble than it's worth?

Jane

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Comments (7)

lindac
15 years ago
Had one....gave it away. Found it easier and cheaper to buy bottled seltzer.
holly_bc
15 years ago
tobyt - we have/use one. DH has cancer genes (the astro sign not the illness) and he THINKS he saves money. We do go thru a significant amount of soda but personally I'm not so sure about the savings not to mention the mess. This present incarnation - an Isi - cost about $100 so it may be awhile before their are any 'significant savings'. :-)

I think it's way more trouble than it's worth. DH seems attached to them. I keep giving them away and he keeps buying them again. Sigh.

I guess the health benefit is you don't get the salt intake that you find in regular soda. As well we have GREAT well water.

If we were on regular chlorinated water, I'd likely pass (and try to get him to do likewise). :-)
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I have one. I go through easily 3-4 liters of seltzer a day and it was getting expensive and hard to lug that many plastic bottles home from the store. We have the 130L cartridge one (from Costco), but because I like it really fizzy and I go through so many liters a day, it was empty in a couple weeks. And I could only get the smaller sized refill canisters at the local stores -- I would have had to mail-order the larger ones. So I invested a little more in a freedom one hose from a company called CO2 Doctor. It lets you hook up a 20lb CO2 tank (like you'd find in a restaurant fountain soda machine) to the sodastream. Although the initial outlay was high -- about $100 for the sodastream, $100 for the freedom one hose, $65 for a used CO2 tank on craigslist, then $30 to exchange the tank for a full one at the local Airgas -- my expenses now are nothing -- one $30 tank of air lasts me almost a year -- at an average of 3 liters a day with several extra pumps per bottle. If I was more frugal with the carbonation level, it would last close to 2 years. So now the $30 that used to get me about 2 weeks worth of seltzer gets me 10 months. Definitely one of the best purchases I ever made. One downside - you will have to find a place to put the 20lb co2 tank - it's big and heavy. We have our sodastream sitting on a pantry shelf with the tank sitting on the floor, all hidden behind the closet door. My sister has friends (who told us about the freedom one in the first place) who keep their sodastream on the counter and the tank in the cabinet below (they drilled a hole for the hose in the counterop). I have no affiliation with the CO2 doctor website or the freedom one product, but if you are a heavy sodastream user and you have the room for the larger tank, I highly recommend it! (I will link to the CO2 doctor site below -- they also have products that let the sodastream take paintball gun CO2 canisters -- apparently, that is also cheaper than purchasing refills through sodastream....) Here is a link that might be useful: Freedom One
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I've had mine for several months now and I love it. My recycling bin is noticeably lighter :-). I drink plain seltzer by the liter...my husband likes the Dr. Pepper taste-alike. You won't be saving money as far as the cost of the carbonator refills, but I like having it always available and ready. It's great for a party where you can offer people choices without investing in large bottles of sodas. I haven't yet made my own syrups, but there is a line of all-natural syrups put out by the makers of SodaStream. My local Bed, Bath and Beyond just started to carry those syrups, but they're rather expensive. Helene
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foodonastump
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I have one somewhere. It was a novelty for a while but in the end it was more expensive and lower quality than buying seltzer, not to mention a nuisance. (I found if I went through the whole bottle quickly it was fine, but once less than about half full it wouldn't stay fizzy long.) The only practical application that I can see is if you want to carbonate a drink itself as opposed to adding seltzer to other ingredients.
blubird
15 years ago
I just bought a SodaStream last week. After getting the bad unit exchanged, we are making seltzer every day. I usually drink a liter bottle every day. I don't think that I will be saving any money, but the enticing aspect of this is that I no longer have to schlep bottles home from the supermarket and then put them out for recycling pickup.

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TobyT
Original Author
15 years ago
Thanks for all the opinions. My DH (also a Cancer!)gets these wild hares for the oddest gadgets. I managed to talk him out of the electric meat slicer and I will let him read this thread and see if he still wants a soda siphon. Maybe I'll tell him about dcarch's square tomatoes...
Jane
holly_bc
14 years ago
A year later I know, but came across this thread and had to smile. :-) Wild hares for sure. Anyone have a 'slapchop' sitting unused in a cupboard for several years? Always figuring how to get these items mysteriously disappeared. It's a life's work. :-)
Lars
14 years ago
We used to have the soda siphon but decided it was more trouble than it was worth. The electric meat slicer is a different story. I was reluctant to buy one at first, but now that I'm used to it, I use it almost daily. It's great for making thin slices from bagels, and it does well for meat, as long as I don't try to make it go through too fast.

Holly, the best tap water I've had was in B.C., but that was back in the 1970s before they started putting fluoride in it.

Lars

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