Carbonated drinks makers, any good?

[Dahliasrule]

I am seriously thinking of getting one of these as the amount of fizzy water and fizzy drinks this household consumes is quite significant. I am hoping using one of these would be less expensive and also reduce our plastic and tin can use.
if you use one, would you recommend it? I always remember when the family had one in the 80’s the cola flavour was not pleasant.

When we bought it, we were told we couldn't use the Sodastream gas canisters for an Aarke. Hm.

Need to check again.

@reluctantbrit - you definitely can, we have been using ours 4+ years. We have two canisters and just drop and exchange the empty one when needed. They are all the same

@reluctantbrit - here. They are compatible with any 60l canister
https://www.aarke.com/uk/getting-started-guide

Does it taste like proper Pepsi? DH is on about getting one because he goes through so much Pepsi. But I don't want to pay out for it if it isn't a good dupe.

We don't like fizzy water, so it wouldn't be worth it for that.

We have a soda stream

It's not cheap. The gas is about £20 a month

@BertieBotts - the sirups from sofa stream ie the Pepsi one you just add to the sparkling water made from machine after it’s done. So you could just buy a Pepsi sirup from soda stream, and try mixing with regular bottled sparkling water first to see if it tastes the same, before investing in any machine

Ohhhjj thanks for the tip 👍

They’re a false economy.

Yes, they save on plastic bottle recycling, but they’re not cheap to run. It’s not a case of buying one and you’ve saved shedloads, they cost about £20 a month in gas, that’s £240 a year. I challenge anyone to spend that much a year on fizzy water. Given you’re only using tap water you can buy the cheapest brand of sparkling water and it’s unlikely to cost you more than that.

Have just looked on Sainsburys, and you can buy a two liter bottle of fizzy water for £0.80. So for the £240 you’ve spent on gas for your soda stream, you can buy 600 litres of sparkling water in Sainsburys. Add the £100 for the machine, and that’s another 300 litres of sparkling water. So approximately 900 litres of sparkling water for the same price. That’s around 2.5 litres of water a day. Nope.

For us, it was more about the amount of plastic we were getting through. One 2l bottle a day is 365 plastic bottles going into recycling and who knows where they end up?

@MayThe4th - for us it’s convenience of not lugging heavy water as can’t park outside house.
Also a 60l cartridge is €7 here. Which works out 8cents a litre. We use one every 6-8 weeks. So around €50 a year

Oh I totally get why some people have them for convenience.

It was just that some were saying here that they save them loads of money which is unlikely.

I don't drive and don't live within walking distance of a big supermarket. Well I do, but I can't carry heavy bottles back. I get a big delivery of heavy things once per month but can't store that many bottles.

I buy a smaller (1l maybe) bottle in the coop most days. It's about 89p. Some days I drink 2. If we average that to a bottle a day I would save money with a soda stream.

Even if I didn't I wouldn't be sending All the bottles to be recycled (I'm not convinced they all get recycled) which tbh is more of a concern for me.

Are the gas canisters recycled/reused?

1 x 1l bottle per day from the co-op will cost me about £324.85 per year. Plus send 365 plastic bottles wherever they end up.

1 gas bottle is £12.99 and makes 60l of water. So about £78 per year. And no bottles wasted!

I easily spend that on sparkling water, we get through a couple of 2l bottles a day.

Any of the flavours I've tried are awful.

It's not about saving money for me. We were buying 14 bottles of sparkling water at a time so they could be delivered so we weren't lugging them back from the supermarket. This took up loads of space to store and also in our recycling bin. So much better now we have a soda stream.

I think we made a calculation based on sparkling water from Lidl and came up with roughly the same amount spent.

But for us the main reason is the plastic.

Ah thanks Caspianberg, will try this!