This is not some exotic technology. Look at the soda fountain at your local McDonalds, it also does exactly the same thing. Gas coming in at a few bar, not at crazy high pressures, going into a small jet which accepts water coming directly from the city mains and spits out soda water instantly in realtime. (There is also a venturi gadget which pulls syrup from the bag and mixes it in; this makes gas pressure critical since changing the air pressure changes the mixing ratio). No more pressurized Cornelius canisters, just bags with negative pressure. Just buy soda fountain hardware because it does exactly what you want.
I would think that a carbonation stone would take forever. Subjecting it to more than about 3 psi would blow it to bits. Ever have a fish tank with an aerator stone? Perhaps 20, or 50, or 100 stones at 3 psi would work quickly? idk.
Look closely at the SodaSteam photo that shows the initial injection of the high pressure CO2 stream into the water. It shoots CO2 down several inches into the water. I bet that the water level has to be exact in order for it to work correctly.
I regard carbonated water as a negative. I'm willing to drink some brands of root bear that don't have much carbonation, but it would be way better flat. I assume that people want some sort of flavored carbonated beverage (like Coke or Pepsi) rather than just plain bubbly water, which I find disgusting -- but not as bad as tonic water. I'm apparently in a minority.
Hubby was a Pepsi addict for decades. Then Coke. Then Shasta. All sugar-free diet colas. He finally broke the habit.
I've never priced the stuff.
I did, because they're the only people I found within a reasonable distance who would sell CO2 in small quantities.
I did find a bargain there: those plastic buckle-like things with springy ears. I also got REI ski gloves at a yard sale maybe 5 years ago.
Have you by any chance seen 'A Walk In The Woods' with Redford? He goes to an REI. His reaction to the prices is exactly right. A fine movie.
That would make a significant difference. I suspect that the Walmart-equivalent of Crystal Light powder would do as well and gives you additional flavor choices.
Isn't that a laxative? ... Yeah, I remember taking it before a colonoscopy. Ew.
Thanks for the information that the brewing stones are stainless steel, where these three hundred dollar ones say they're "316L" material.
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This one says it's 2 micron porosity made out of "sintered stainless steel SS316" on a "Stainless steel 316" body.
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These are either "ceramic" or "stainless steel" (maybe both?).
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This Amazon listing says it's "304 stainless steel".
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However, most on Amazon just say "stainless" but it's all probably fine.
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This one is 1/2 micron porosity so the range is from there to 2 microns
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I started off looking for an air gun that blasts unregulated 800 psi gas in short bursts just a millimeter above the water level, but if I can't find that, the carbonating stone stuck inside the water might work too.
I don't know how long it will take though, as the typical use of these carbonating stones appears to be at low PSI for long periods of time.
Thank you also for letting me know that 50 psi is no problem for these carbonating stones, where I wonder if they'll handle short bursts of unregulated 800 psi to replicate what the sodastream does in some way.
Probably a carbonating stone needs to be done slowly whereas the air gun bursts will work quickly - which is essentially the whole objective.
My choices seem to be: a. The current fill-the-headspace-and-shake method takes five minutes. b. I'm assuming an immersed carbonating stone would cut that time down. c. But better yet would be the five second 800 psi airgun injector.
The carbonation stones are so cheap I'm going to get a few to test. But I'm still looking for a pointy thing to inject the gas at pressure.
I might be able to find a pointy tip of steel or plastic that I can mount in the cap of the soda bottle and then use a quarter turn valve (a button would be better but I've never seen them for air compressors) in short bursts.
I'm not going to disagree where the advantage of the carbonating stone are the bubbles, but all the descriptions I've seen of using them takes time.
I just realized though that I can attach the stone to a soda bottle cap, and then flip the soda bottle upside down so that the stone is under water.
But if the stone takes time, that's the one thing I don't want to take, not that I can't just pressurize it at 20 psi and leave it there for hours, but if I do that, inevitable connection leaks will drain the CO2 tank.
Well, the simple answer to that is for me to buy a sodastream for about $100 (which comes with a couple of bottles and CO2 canisters). :)
You're right though that the perfect answer would be a nozzle with one tiny hole that I can mount in the cap of a one liter soda bottle.
Then all I'd need is some kind of "trigger" where I already have quarter turn valves on my quick connect hoses but a button valve would be best.
Do they sell one-press button valves for air pressure hose fittings?
Yup. I lost a couple of tanks worth of gas over the years due to leaks. That's why I like my current five minute method, as if there are leaks, they can only leak for the duration of the carbonation process.
With the sodastream that five minutes becomes fifteen seconds (if you shut off the 5# carbon dioxide tank after each refill, which most people do).
One of my friends suggested a "pressure cooker", which is designed to not only hold in pressure but to vent at a given weight-based pressure he said.
Thank you for your keg experience, which is what I do not have. Why is a keg carbonated anyway? Isn't the beer already carbonated?
Even so, it's good to know you can hear the gas go inside the keg. For a soda bottle, I crush all the air out and the only thing I hear is the initial fill which is instantaneous almost, at 50psi.
Then I don't hear anything for the five minutes it takes to get enough of the gas to dissolve in the cold water.
Funny you mention that. When I shake the bottle, I see the pressure gauge drop from about 50 psi to about 45 or 46 psi, and as the five minutes get closer to ringing the bell, from about 50 psi to about 48 or 49 psi.
What I'm seeing (and you hearing) is more gas dissolving into the cold liquid as we shake which exposes more surface area to the gas.
My experience (with the gauge) is the same exactly as yours with the sound. I thought of putting flow gauge on the hose but I couldn't find a carbon dioxide flow gauge. Only oxygen flow gauges. And they were expensive.
Plus it's another leak waiting to happen.
It will be very interesting though to put a stone on the inside of the soda bottle cap, and then inverting the soda bottle so that the stone is under water. I will order one from Amazon because they're so inexpensive I may as well use them no matter what I end up doing.
I never looked much at the flavorings but you've convinced me that there must be a decent flavor at a cheap enough price to make it useful even though I wouldn't want to add sugar in any form (fake or real).
I was surprised how little magnesium citrate it takes to flavor a liter (just a pinch) and then when I looked it up today, I was surprised the citric acid is half the price of the Calm, so I will try that next.
As for juice, ANY juice will flavor the water, whether it's orange juice, or apple juice - where the problem is I don't want to add sugar.
Lemon or lime juice often need sugar, which is why I don't use them.
BTW, today I called the Praxair, Lindy, Airgas, Carbonics, and grocery stores to get prices and availability on carbon dioxide forms.
If we start with the typical $15 sodastream canister refill, at 45 liters, that comes to about 33 cents per liter (probably more with shipping).
Hooking up to a 5# carbon dioxide tank (either refilling the canisters or just hooking the five pound tank directly to a sodastream machine) drops that easily in half, and maybe even to about a third at a bit over 10 cents per liter, given the cost is $31 to have a 5# CO2 tank swapped out at Praxair and just under $30 to have that 5# CO2 tank refilled at Carbonics.
Surprisingly, the dry ice, at around $2.50 to $3.50 a pound, comes in, nominally anyway, at half even that, at about 7 cents per liter if we assume we use a pound of dry ice to fill a 14.5 ounce sodastream canister.
I found out that everyone sells dry ice in five and ten pound blocks, which they then weigh at the store (as they sublime over time) and charge you whatever weight is left time that price per pound.
Each method has an advantage.
The sodastream canister tradein has the advantage that you don't have to think, but you do need a minimum of three canisters (they give a discount for the two-pack refills) and it's the most expensive at about $0.33/liter.
The dry ice is the cheapest, surprisingly, assuming you don't have to overbuy it, but you likely have to get five pounds, so you kind of need about five canisters to fill up at a time to make the waste worth it.
And, the dry ice method requires zero additional costs in equipment.
Refilling the sodastream from your liquid carbon dioxide tank is somewhere in between in cost (as the price of CO2 went up since I last bought it!).
In terms of inconvenience, it doesn't seem worth it to tip the 5# CO2 tank upside down to refill the canisters with liquid carbon dioxide though, although this allows you to have only a single canister, which is one advantage of this method of refilling the canister with liquid C02.
In terms of convenience, it seems the most convenient method is to just attach the 5# liquid carbon dioxide tank to the back of the sodastream, where my wife would kill me with that tank in the kitchen so I have to move it to the garage or basement but other than that, it will work just fine.
The convenience factor of that method is that a single $30 5# refill (which is 80 ounces) should carbonate without waste, so we can use the 14.5 ounce figure for a sodastream canister to calculate that five pound tank is equivalent to 80/14.5 ounces or 5-1/2 sodastream canisters continually.
At 45 liters of water per sodastream canister, that is 5.5 times 45 liters, which is just under 250 liters of carbonated water at about $30 of C02 which works out to about $0.12 per liter of carbonated water.
That assumes I pay the $100 for a sodastream plus about $40 for the high pressure 4,500 psi stainless steel quick connect hose and the brass quick connect adapter which is just a quick connect on one side and a female M18x1.5 thread which takes the brass top of a sodastream canister (which usually comes with the kit so you don't have to cannibalize a canister).
Still, I'd like to find a way to insert a tiny 1/10 mm nozzle into a 1 liter coca cola bottle cap so that I could test out replicating the $100 sodastream for the price of that one thin nozzle & quick on/off valve.
I don't disagree that the welding shops swap out the 20# tanks more frequently than 5# tanks so there are economies of scale for them.
I called today for prices on the larger sizes where it's huge the difference per pound of liquid carbon dioxide when refilled at Carbonics. Carbonic Refills = $27+tax/5#, $30+tax/10# & $32+tax/20# Praxair Swaps = $30.90/5# & $49.14/20# (includes hazmat fee & taxes)
Praxair won't touch the 10 pound cylinders, and those are steel prices, where I don't know why their charge is different for aluminum cylinders.
But you can tell that for refilling, the setup is where all the cost is. At about $35 (taxed) for 20 pounds it's only about 3.5 cents per liter.
I'm sorry if I wasn't clear. I'd only put 14.5 ounces maximum of crushed dry ice into the canister. But in calculating costs, there will be wastage from travel and storage and preparation, so I assume a pound is consumed.
The canister has multiple separate safety over venting features, one of which is the 10 mm vent over pressure valve but there is also a tiny ~1/2 mm hole drilled in the lower part of the M18x1.5 male threads which would vent whenever you unscrew the valve to prevent the valve from shooting out like a bullet if you forgot to loosen the 10mm overpressure valve.
There is also a black rubber o-ring in the M18x1.5 male threads but that's likely more to prevent leakage than a safety feature.
Yes. Both methods work. Each has advantages & disadvantages.
The advantage of refilling the 14.5 ounce canisters using the liquid carbon dioxide tank with the eductor (siphon) tube is that everything sits upright, and the disadvantage of the tank that I have (which has no siphon tube) is that I have to tilt it at a steep angle on an upside down chair (or strap it in upside down). But that's not a big deal once I have a jig.
The advantage of connecting the big tanks directly to the sodastream is you hook it up once, and then you use from five to twenty canisters' worth of gas (carbonating 45 liters per each) without needing to touch anything.
At an average of a liter of bubbly a day, a 20# CO2 tank will last 22 times
45 liters, which is just under three years of bubbly from the big tank. For the smaller 5# tank, it's only about 250 days but that's convenient enough.
The disadvantage of connecting the liquid C02 tanks directly to the sodastream are that you have to hide the tank and hoses if you leave it in the kitchen - or you have to use downstairs or into the garage otherwise.
I will call PepsiCo to try to find out how small the nozzle is.
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800-763-2258
BTW, I found out that almost every size from sodastream is overcounted. In the 1 L SodaStream bottle you only carbonate 840 ml. In the 0.5 L SodaStream bottle you only carbonate 450 ml. In the 0.8 L SodaStream glass carafe you only carbonate 620 ml.
Looking at the photos and brewing beer links, why wouldn't it work to just pick up a handful of plastic or stainless steel soda bottle carbonating caps and one ball lock disconnect attached to the carbon dioxide regulator?
*Stainless Steel Soda Bottle Carbonating Cap*
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And then fill each soda bottle 3/4 with cold water & pressurize with this?
*Ball Lock (Gas) Quick Disconnect - 1/4" Barb*
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I'm guessing you squeeze out the top air from a soda bottle & then fill that top space with pure carbon dioxide gas at something like 40 psi & then just leave it capped in a refrigerator to absorb as much CO2 as it can.
Shouldn't it stay pressurized at 40 psi until you finally open it to drink?
If you have as many carbonating caps as you have soda bottles, would each water bottle stay pressurized at that 40 psi until you need to open the bottle to drink?
Once you open the bottle of course, then you lose the 40 psi in the head space but can't you then either re-pressurize back to the 40 psi or just cap it with a normal cap like any soda that you drink before it goes flat?
Why wouldn't that work even easier & cheaper than a sodastream machine?
Soda bottle carbonation cap & ball lock quick disconnect kit.
When you brew beer or other beverages, you normally do it in something other than a keg. It's easiest if you have something with a wide top and lid. That way, after fermentation is done and you transfer the liquid to something else, it's easy to clean out the residue from the yeast, etc. There's generally an airlock or "bubbler" in the lid of the fermentation vessel to let out the extra CO2. That means that, while the beer will be slightly carbonated after fermentation, it's not nearly enough to be what most people these days would consider to be "carbonated."
You can then carbonate the beverage naturally or artificially (with compressed CO2).
If you bottle the beer, if it has a bit of sugar and the yeast still left, it will keep fermenting in the sealed bottle and produce carbonation. Of course, this does produce some yeast residue in the bottle (lees). It can also be dangerous if you misjudge how much fermentation was left to happen. I'm told that exploding bottles of beer are not at all fun. (This process of carbonation in the bottle is often called bottle-conditioned.)
Some beverages are filtered after fermentation, and the filters are fine enough that they filter out the yeast. (The typical US light pilsner like Bud or Busch are filtered this way. The Adolph Coors Co. made ceramic filters for use in filtering things like this - I'm not sure if Coors Ceramic is still around or not...) These ceramic filters are not typically something you'd use at home. The beer needs to be forced through them under pressure and it still takes a while.
Without that yeast, you do need to artificially carbonate the beverage. That could be done in large tanks or in the kegs. Tap systems usually add some carbonation as well.
Let's say you've got Cornelius kegs and let the beer naturally carbonate in them. Now you have a mess at the bottom and will have to clean it once the keg is emptied. These kegs have kind of small "hatches" at the top (or at least they used to - it's been a long time since I did any brewing myself) and you need long-handled brushes to scrub the bottom of the keg.
What you might do instead is keep fermenting in your tub or vat until the sugar content is way down. Then you try to keep the residues from being transferred over to the kegs, or maybe even use some filtering to keep out the larger bits. Now you've got your beer in the keg and it's not going to ferment much more and produce carbonation, so you need to artificially carbonate it.
BTW, when bottle-conditioning beer, it's sometimes necessary to add a bit of sugar when bottling if the beer didn't have enough left to ensure good carbonation. Add too much and you have beer on the ceiling.
Beers and ales before modern times, with sealed bottles and kegs that can withstand pressure and with tap systems, were typically rather flat and might be unappetizing to people now.
Making your own does mean that you don't have to lug all of that water back from the store. :-)
Also, given the poor track record of the recycling system in my area, I'm pretty sure that I put less waste into landfills by making my own sparkling water since I'm not constantly throwing away cans and bottles.
was in the automotive tools section of the air compressor section!
The hole in the tip is so small I can't even see it without glasses. But the problem is the gun has to handle 800 psi & it says it's only 90psi.
And I found an almost perfect teeny-tiny-airhole gun tip too! It was in the welding section!
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What do you think about those threaded MIG Welding "contact tips", whatever they are, they seem to be in sizes of 0.023", 0.030", 0.035", 0.045" sizes.
Do you think copper threaded mig welding contact tips can handle 800 psi?
I even experimented with these three free citrus oil flavors.
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What I don't think will work are the oxyacetylene tips.
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What do you think about making an apparatus with the mig contact tips?
I'm not going to disagree until I've tried it. When I get home from work I can try it out at home with just 120 psi from my air compressor.
The good thing is the automotive gun hole is so tiny I can barely see it. The bad thing is the automotive gun is huge compared to what I need.
The smallest TIG welder hole opening I could find was 0.023", but it had the advantage of being really tiny and already threaded. I'll stop by home depot on my way home from work to see if I can find what the threads are.
I'm sure there is a good reason the gun says it is 90 psi, where even if we double that, it's far too low, and besides, the gaskets have to handle it.
I think that might be true to a huge extent, but I think the bottle itself _is_ pressurized because it holds the pressure during storage in a frig.
It's not the bottle that isn't pressurized but the connection of the bottle to the sodastream that has an overpressure valve, I think.
I couldn't get out of sodastream what pressure they pressurize the bottles to, but they say the bottles "expire" after a few years.
What I love about the carbonation cap idea, which I think it was you who brought it up first, is that it's so simple in threading it together.
I get a dozen of the carbonation caps, one for each bottle.
I get one of the Y-shaped fillers and I fill up each bottle.
At that point I can let it sit for days to slowly carbonate.
As you said, the carbon dioxide in the water will eventually equilibrate with whatever partial pressure of CO2 is in the headspace, but I can always squeeze all that out and repressurize the headspace whenever I want to.
It seems to be the slowest method overall but if I do ten or twenty liters at a time, it's actually the least amount of fuss. I would only have to refrigerate the bottle a day or two before using it so the frig can hold only one bottle while the other nineteen can be on a pantry shelf like a soda bottle sits in the shelves in the grocery store.
The carbonating stone idea is still in the cards, mainly because it's so simple and so cheap but the more I look at it, I have to add a check valve of some sort so that the water doesn't flow back to destroy the regulator.
I didn't think of that, but the carbonating cap can come with a nozzle in addition to the soda bottle threads, so yes, two can be done at the same time.
I pressurize the head space
I add gas from the stone which sinks to the bottom.
Right now I'm going to go to home depot to see what male threads are on the end of the copper tip 0.23" tig welder contact tip, because all I need then is to attach that copper tip to a piece of female threaded pipe attached to the bottle cap.
Please keep the ideas coming as this is replicating a soda stream without having a sodastream to replicate.
People pay good money to lift weights at the gym. It probably all evens out.
Kalifornia's bottle recycling program is screwed. The state collects the money, but since there are so few recyclers now (in spite of legal requirements, it's cheaper for supermarkets to pay the fine than to establish recycling systems) most people just toss theirs into the recycling bin. Windfall for the people who pick up the recycling at the expense of the purchasers who also pay extra to have their recycling recycled.
Apparently containers with deposits, cardboard, concrete and asphalt are the only things worth recycling. I see a guy with a tiny Toyota pickup loaded higher than the cab with flattened cardboard from behind the shops across the street. A couple of years ago he said he made $25/load and it's a 10-mile round trip to the recycler.
Some people are just bloody-minded and save up enough bottles/cans to make a 10-mile round trip worth doing. It may be noted that I once brought back over $135.00 worth of aluminum cans (pickup truck).
That being said, I'm glad hubby stopped drinking the stuff. Rots your teeth and is a general nuisance no matter how you look at it.
When I was a kid both beer and soda came in cases of 1 quart bottles. Both the sturdy cardboard case and the bottles were returnable. It was sort of a savings plan for a rainy day when you took the cases back.
I don't think that's correct. I think the store keeps the entire CRV. I think the only part the state gets is the sales tax on the CRV.
So, for example, let's say (for arguments sake) the store sells ten cases of soda a day every day for a year - which is 24 sodas per case times ten cases a day times 365 days in a year which is about $9 thousand dollars in CRV if I rough it out in my head using approximations.
At roughly a 10% California sales tax approximation, that's about $900 in sales tax on the CRV alone which California _does_ get to collect (and which the poor hapless consumer _never_ gets back when they return the bottle for their CRV).
California likely makes billions alone on just the tax on the CRV.
In the richer towns, all the supermarkets pay the fine for not having a recycling center inside the store or within a mile radius, which tells you that it's cheaper for them to pay the fine and keep the CRV than it is to recycle the bottles.
In California, there are three types of weekly pickup, the blue recycling, the green landscaping, and the gray trash, where they make money on the blue and green but they lose money on the gray.
What you could do is recycle almost everything yourself by composting the gray stuff but they don't charge you any less if you don't have gray pickups.
And, in fact, they give you up to five free blue and five free green cans which are four feet or so high and three feet square in width, simply because they make money on every blue and green can they pick up.
They make the gray cans very small as you pay by the size of them.
In California, you can only give them fifty cans/bottles at a time if you ask them to COUNT them (and pay you the CRV by number), but if you give them more than fifty bottles, then they have the option to just weigh them and give you an "average price", which is some kind of funky calculation.
This leaves out wholesale sales (e.g. to restaurants for resale), and ten cases a day is likely quite low for grocery stores in most urban areas. Especially in modern times where canned flavored carbonated water is popular.
However, they obtain the benefits of the tax in terms of road improvements, public safety, et cetera, et alia.
As noted above, it's likely in the low millions.
Or you can flatten the cans and take them to a metal recycling facility where you're paid by the pound, which is what I did before I gave up on canned beverages.
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