I have one and use it near daily - but I only go with straight soda water, no flavorings. Rarely I’ll mix cranberry juice with a little fizzy water.
It’s helped me get off the diet soda, too.
I’m home now and looked. Another brand of flavoring we have is Torani. That’s the brand of my coffee syrups.
Grape is easy - add grape juice. Just a splash, if you like a “spritzer”, or get yourself a concentrate and add a spoonful to a glass of soda water if you want a stronger fruit flavor.
I make my own ginger syrup - a simple syrup (equal parts water and sugar) with candied ginger or sliced fresh ginger root simmered in it until it turns golden and smells of ginger. A spoonful of that into a glass of soda water makes a pretty tasty ginger ale.
There a recipe here for a cola. Ain’t nobody got time for that. But if you do, more power to you. A little splash of grenadine or the syrup from maraschino cherries into the glass will make your cola into cherry cola.
I make a lemon-lime with lemon and lime essential oils in a simple syrup, because I’m lazy, but you could also do it by simmering some lemon and lime peels in simple syrup.
I got one last year for Xmas and love it & use it everyday. Not sure what else I can add.
The CO[sub]2[/sub] bottles are $30 only*** to buy***, to exchange an empty for a full one is only $15. Yeah, it’s still too much for the gas, but that custom machined adapter fitting thing that allows them to be refilled is like $60! Also I don’t know how easy or difficult getting them refilled can be, nor where exactly to get it done (sporting goods, welding supply maybe?). I exchange the bottles at Staples right at the front desk. I’m literally in & out in 2 minutes. Even if it is three times the cost it’s really easy & convenient, and three times a few bucks is still only a few bucks in my book.
That’s the main reason I love it- Convenience. Even with the somewhat over-priced CO[sub]2[/sub] refills it’s still less than regular soda. And if you think a few plastic bottles is going to save the planet, well, more power to ya! I drink a lot of soda year round so I love it simply because I don’t have to lug six, eight, ten 2-liter bottles from the supermarket, in & out of my car, and up the stairs every week or so!
To reiterate what others said: You’ll want to get extra plastic bottles to keep filled with water & in the fridge. Buy a two-pack (it’s $20 but a single bottle is $15!). If you carbonate warm water and then put ice in it it’ll instantly go flat (just like regular soda). Also don’t ever use the grapefruit flavor unless you have a bottle just for it because once you do, no amount of cleaning will ever get the grapefruit smell/taste out of it!
We chill and offgas our water in a pitcher in the fridge, and fill the Sodastream bottles from that before fizzing them.
I hate my drinking water. It has a funny taste to it even chilled. Every time I go back to NYC, I’m reminded just how much I miss the water there. The only way I can make it palatable is with the soda stream. We use ours every single day. I love it. The carbonation makes all the difference.
Those $15 SodaStream tanks are 14.5 oz. Like I said upthread, it costs me $3.50 to fill a 24-oz tank. That’s a difference of ninety cents per ounce. The adapter paid for itself in three fills; after five fills my two tanks were paid for as well. But to each their own…
As for the ease of getting it filled, there are several Sports Authority stores in my metro area. I took both tanks in today, and was in and out in about 10 minutes. Not quite as quick as getting an exchange, but fast enough for me.
Love mine (I also have one for the office). I’ve had them about eight years and I seldom drink anything else (except coffee). I think I tried a couple of the flavorings that came with the machines but never had much interest. Perhaps a few times a year I’ll mix with cran-raspberry concentrate or with chocolate syrup for a milkless egg cream.
The new models being promoted these days have smaller bottles and smaller gas canisters that only do 60 liters.
My wife and I have a big problem with fizzy water. That stuff’s the equivalent of crack in our house. We had several Soda Streams, each one eventually died when some plastic part in the mechanism snapped. Soda Stream people were good about sending replacements, but I eventually got fed up with the breakages and the high cost of the gas.
I went to a home brew supply store, and they hooked me up with a real CO2 cylinder and regulator, plus some tubing and an adaptor that pressurized a cap that fits on any bottle with the same mouth as a standard 2 liter soda bottle. The up front cost was a little higher, mostly because of the regulator, but it only costs a couple bucks to fill up my five pound tank and that lasts for months. Couldn’t be happier.
That’s my bitch about Soda Stream, too - I don’t like any artificial sweeteners, and I have yet to find syrups without them.
We use plain tap water; I think our water tastes fine right out of the tap.
Interesting ideas - I’ll have to look into the “naturals.”
We use our Soda Stream all the time, too. What I usually drink is weak fruit juice mixed with plain soda water (I don’t need a strong flavour); my husband drinks Dr. Pete and “diet Coke” - he seems to like them just fine. I also drink just soda water.
Thanks for the answers. I expect a gadget like this would be really helpful for people who have to carry their groceries up a few flights of stairs. Did that for a couple of years, and I REALLY hated soda/bottled water by the time I left. Not the taste, the the carrying part.
See my post above!
Thanks. Like I said I never pursued the refill option so I didn’t know if it was a hassle or not. I also forgot something in regards to those adapters. Yes they are $60, but they’re not for putting on SodaStream bottles to refill them, they’re for adapting a paintball gun CO[sub]2[/sub] bottle to the SodaStream machine itself. Which means I’d also have to buy a paintball bottle as well (another $20-$30). I’ll take another look as I do go thru at least a bottle a month.
Pretty sure that even if there was an adapter for the SS tank, sporting goods stores still wouldn’t refill them, it would be against DOT regulations. If you read the fine print you technically don’t own the SodaStream tanks, they just grant you the rights to use them strictly in accordance to their specifications. IANAL but I assume it’s a loophole that makes it easier to sell & ship them because technically they are HAZMAT. CO[sub]2[/sub] is obviously not flammable (it puts fires out!) but they’re still pressurized cylinders and could potentially explode.
How many 8 oz. glasses of soda can you get out of one C02 canister? IOW, how does the price of SodaStream soda compare to soda I’d buy in the store? I seriously want one now…
Right, you have to buy your own CO2 tanks. I bought a package when I got the mod, the adapter plus the two tanks for $110 or so. The adapter screws onto the CO2 tank, which in turn screws into the SodaStream.
I did run into a problem at Sports Authority once, early on. I opened my mouth about the refill being for my SodaStream, and the clerk said they’re not allowed to fill tanks for “consumption purposes” and refused to do it. Since then, I’ve not volunteered that information, and they haven’t asked (even though the tanks say “SodaMod” in big bold letters), and I’ve had no problems. If they ever do ask, I plan to state that they’re for my kid, who’s really into paintball. Someone gave me the tanks, I don’t know what the “SodaMod” is all about.
Speaking of which, another option for getting CO2 tanks filled is paintball shops/fields.
The canister is good for 60 litres (which sounds about right with our usage). A refill is $15, so that’s 25c to carbonate each litre.
Flavouring costs vary hugely, and will also depend on how strong you mix each drink. I’d guess at least another 25c a litre, maybe more.
So maybe 50c+ a litre? (which is pretty close to what I guessed back in post 3).This doesn’t include the cost of the initial purchase. What’s a two-litre bottle of your usual soda cost you? You’re not going to save a huge amount using a soda stream.
I think a 2 liter bottle of soda in my part of the world runs around $1.99. So it sounds like I’d save at 50%. I quit buying soda because the 12-packs of cans were in the neighborhood of $5 and I throw away a lot of unfinished cans, so I was throwing away money. I realized that I could make a half-gallon pitcher of iced tea for about $0.25- $0.30 (depending on my use of lemon & sugar) and I started doing that, but I love carbonated drinks. So it wouldn’t be less expensive than the iced tea, but I could have naturally flavored sodas for pennies on the dollar – AND I’d know what they were flavored and/or sweetened with.
So now I want one. Hell, I might even carbonate the iced tea…
It is fairly strongly recommended to not carbonate already flavored beverages. Anything but water is a no no in these machines. The solutes in flavored beverages provide too many nucleation sites for the carbon dioxide. Basically everything goes crazy fizzy and explodes all over your counter. However, if you make a very very strong tea, say with triple or quadruple the tea bags, you could certainly dilute that concentrated tea stock with the seltzer water from the SodaStream.
My girlfriend keeps powdered and liquid flavor enhancers, which she mixes in after carbonating water. One time, she pulled a bottle out of the fridge, poured it in a cup, added a few drops of flavor, then realized she forgot to carbonate it. We’d read all of the dire warnings about carbonating water only, but we figured, what’s going to happen from a few drops of flavor?
So she poured it back in the bottle and hooked it up to the SodaStream. The mess was spectacular. Lesson learned.
I meant to post about this earlier, but I forgot.
There’s a company that makes syrup bases, to which you can add your own sweetener. There are instructions to make syrup using stevia.
I haven’t tried any of this out yet, but it’s on my to-do list.
My husband did that with the diet coke recently - I don’t think he’ll be doing it again, either. 
I think the soda stream is pretty economical for someone like me, who either drinks plain soda water or just uses a teaspoon or so of flavouring - those bottles last me forever.