Endless Liquid Refreshment

rabtech writes "I'm very lazy. As part of that continuing effort, I've come up with a guide for installing a soda fountain in the house. I've detailed how to get the equipment, hoses, and supplies, as well as how to install and calibrate the system. Now you won't ever need to move for lack of liquid refreshment! My next project: Food Replicator."

hmmm....

[sickmtbnutcase]

As if people aren't fat enough...an endless supply of extra calories, extra sugar, and easy dehydration from too much caffeine. I'll install a water fountain: I perfer to keep my teeth and not get fat.

One important thing to note...

[iwillrefuse]

I had my own soda machine setup in our old house for a couple of years. While the appeal is definatly there, cost savings should not be among them. The stories you hear about "the cup costing more than the actual soda" is competely false While it is slight cheaper than purchasing 2-liters, after doing the math, it really only has a cost savings of about 20%, assuming your paying around $40 per pre-mix box, and $15 or so for the CO2. It is damn cool though, and the chicks dig it.

Better drink lots of soda

[ErikRed1488]

I work for one of the vendors listed on that site. We sell every part you could possibly need to do something like this, but we don't sell to home consumers or even individual restaurants. We're a sister company of the largest manufacturer of fountain soda machines in the world. So, working were I do, I've found out a fair amount about these machines. We have about 90 employees in our office and haven't installed a fountain machine because with so few employees the lines would get coated with syrup in no time. You really need a larger volume of people, or you will have to flush the lines all the time. Personally, I say just get yourself a Culligan water dispenser and save your money and teeth. If you really need soda, buy 2 liter bottles.

Re:One important thing to note...

[Safety Cap]

assuming your paying around $40 per pre-mix box, and $15 or so for the CO2

You're getting ripped off, then. It may be because you aren't buying in bulk, or piggy-backing off a volume order.

Pre-mix runs us about US$15/box and CO2 is provided free o' charge. The cost per 20 oz cup is about US$0.015... hardly close to the US$0.99/litre bottle.

even lazier

[trmj]

Well, I'm too lazy to find all of that stuff and then go install it.

So, I found this [partypig.com] instead.

It seems like it should work just as well and have only a minimally higher cost, but the up front cost is much much less (~$500 vs. ~50).

w00t for extended laziness!

Beer-delivery equipment is expensive...

[Goonie]

My sister used to run a hotel. The gadgetry to dispense beer is extremely expensive, particularly the refrigeration gear to serve the beer at the appropriate temperature.

In any case, if you're going to go to the effort of a beer tap at home, why not go the whole hog and have it dispense Chimay [chimay.be], preferably Chimay Blue? Not only is it wonderful drinking - it's about 10% alcohol... :)

Re:Even more impressive

[Sax Maniac]

Not really. A basic setup for dispensing beer at home runs about $200. Beer is even simpler to serve than soda: there's no on-the-fly mixing. Add a few extra bucks if you want the special sparkler head that makes Guinness look so nice.

If you don't intend to brew your beer, it's even less, because you don't have to buy the kegs to put the beer in the first place.

So yes, that means all you guys out there, it is okay for you to go get that CO2 system to server beer on tap. Really, it's cheap, and it impresses the party guests.

Re:One important thing to note...

[Paradise Pete]

I gotta go along with Safety Cap. When I owned a bar my incremental cost of making a 12 ounce soft drink was slightly over four cents. And they supplied the gun and the rest. And if I had a problem they would send someone out to fix it for free. I was buying more than you, of course, but not a huge amount.

Re:interesting

[theperplepigg]

Read the related article [snopes.com] at Snopes. In short: Those rumors are BS.

--paul

pre vs post - makes all the difference

[The Monster]

assuming your [sic] paying around $40 per pre-mix box

Well, no wonder. You were buying pre-mix, not post-mix. The economics of it are really quite simple: With pre-mix, you're paying to ship water as well as syrup, and therefore occupying roughly 5.5 times the volume of the syrup alone. With post-mix, you use your own water, which is virtually free by comparison. Having done time in the fast food business, I can tell you that the only people who use pre-mix are the ones who don't have a water supply, like the circus concessions mentioned in the article. OTOH, if your municipal water is as bad as mine, you'll want to invest in a home water purification system.

Re:Dentists' goldmine

[mesach]

Wouldn't it then go

1. Have coder install endless soda fountain.
2. coders' teeth fall out
3. PROFIT!

since you have the roadmap you don't need the ???

Sodamistic

[caduguid]

You just brought back one of those embarrassing first job moments. Worse than selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door, it was selling home pop-machines! Evil company called 'sodamistic', long-since-defunct, I'm sure.

A valuable formative experience in the sleazy world of hard-sell direct sales, it lets me watch movies like Tin Men or Boiler Room with an insider's appreciation, and more importantly, it taught me the importance of never ever letting a salesman inside your house. (Not that time-share group sales pitches are much better.)

For those who are interested, a google search for sodamistic turned up a minor reference in the comments section of this totally on-topic to this story web page: How to Make Your Own Carbonated Soda (Coke, Pepsi, ...) [tinyurl.com].

Re:hmmm....

[Jucius Maximus]

"I'll install a water fountain: I perfer to keep my teeth and not get fat."

One thing that is underrated is getting a dedicated water jug and putting it in the FRIDGE to keep it really cold. Over the last month or so I have gotten addicted to this. We have a RO Water Purification System at home (RO = reverse osmosis) because there's cauliform and iron in the well from which our home's water is drawn. (I live in a farming area, each house has its own water pump feeding it instead of a city grid.)

Really good quality, really COLD water is REALLY good. And I never guilty about pouring myself another glass. This is really worth a try!

The only downside is that you get spoiled. During weekdays, I live in Toronto at a place I am renting and the water tastes horrid to me. I have to bring bottles of it from home every week. And then there's the water in Quebec City... (shudder)

Aspartame FUD

[Jerky McNaughty]

Besides which, there is evidence that diet soda drinks are mildly carcinogenic and may slow down the metabolism enough to negate the fact that they are less caloric.

Bullshit.

From the MSF (Multiple Sclerosis Foundation) website, for example (here [msfocus.org]):

The metabolism of aspartame in the human body and the proposed toxicities from its metabolic components have concerned a lot of people and have been the emphasis of many post-marketing surveillance studies. Aspartame is metabolized by digestive enzymes and peptides to three common dietary components: amino acids, aspartic acid, and phenylalanine. Minute amounts of methanol can also be detected. Eating foods such as meat, dairy, fruits, and vegetables will also produce these same components, but in greater amounts than aspartame. For example, a glass of milk has 6 times more phenylalanine and 13 times more aspartic acid and a glass of tomato juice provides 6 times more methanol than a beverage the same size sweetened with 100 percent aspartame. Interestingly enough, it is impossible for humans to digest enough aspartame to raise the levels of these metabolic components to a dangerous level.

Show me any Internet rumor or fiction about aspartame and I'll show you research from a reputable organization with no vested interest (MSF, ADA, French and Canadian equivalents of the American FDA, Mayo Clinic, etc.) that says the opposite.

Re:Even more impressive

[ncc74656]

Would be if you'd managed to rig a kegorator to dispense Guinness.

There's no need to rig a kegerator when you can just buy one from the local homebrew shop...or even at Home Depot. The one Home Depot carries runs about $500 IIRC, which is probably about what you'd put into buying a fridge and modding it into a kegerator.

(Of course, if you can get a fridge cheap/free, you could build a kegerator for less. I traded a six-pack of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale clone for the fridge that I'm now using for temperature-controlled fermentation. I still need to do a writeup on connecting an Apple II to it as a temperature controller...)

Re:Even more impressive

[Cranky_92109]

The only problem with dispensing Guiness is that you need a special nitrogen tank and a CO2 tank. Draught Guinness takes a mix of around 75% nitrogen to 25% CO2.

Re:Even more impressive

[dildatron]

I have a Guinness tap I made at home, and you need more than the special stout/restrictor plate nozzle. The other half of the mix is a nitrogen/CO2 mix (usually 75%/25%). It is what gives Guinness it's creaminess look, as well as the cascading shower of bubbles when poured just right. The setup is probably another $150 beyond what it would cost for a normal beer tap (I have both).

Also, nitrogen tanks are thicker because they are filled to much higher pressue, and thus are more expensive for the tank, as well as the gas mix.

Still, nothing beats having Guinness on tap at home. Haven't met anyone yet who isn't impressed, especially when I am serving my own brewed beer through it on one spout, and Guinness on the other...

Buy a heart rate monitor

[FredFnord]

This kind of thing is frequently due to people not having a clue how to exercise and driving their hearts way too hard. Pick up a heart rate monitor for less than $100... Polar is a good brand. Set it for your optimum heart rate speed (the watches come with some relatively good guidelines) and stay in them. Wham, suddenly you're only a tiny bit more likely to die of a heart attack while exercising than you are while getting up from the sofa to get some chips.

-fred

Re:Aspartame FUD

[RedSynapse]

This is an urban legend.

• Snopes [snopes.com]
• The FDA [fda.gov]
• MIT [mit.edu]

Re:pre vs post - makes all the difference

[DJPenguin]

Semantics - a pre-mix box could be "pre-mixed" ie, already mixed. Post mix - it's mixed AFTER the delivery. Kinda makes some sense both ways round...

FYI regarding diet soda...

[Andy Dodd]

It's not half the calories. It's 1/100 or less. Aspartame (NutraSweet) has approx. the same calories per unit weight as sugar, but is 100-200 times sweeter per unit weight. (It's THAT strong. NutraSweet sugar replacements are 99% inert powder.)

One would have to drink a few liters of diet soda to even reach 10 calories.

Calorie-wise, diet soda = water.

Re:Aspartame FUD

[Moitah]

Aspartame is an excitotoxin.

From http://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/mom/aspartame/aspartame.h tml [ox.ac.uk]:

Aspartame is hydrolysed in the body to three chemicals, aspartic acid (40%), phenylalanine (50%) and methanol (10%). Aspartic acid is an amino acid. Much research has been carried out to determine its behaviour in the body when it is taken in its free form, i.e. unbound to proteins. It is claimed that when it is ingested the blood plasma levels of aspartate and glutamate rise significantly. Both aspartate and glutamate act as neurotransmitters in the brain, carrying information from neuron to neuron. When there is an excess of neurotransmitter, certain neurons are killed by allowing too much calcium into the cells. This influx causes excessive numbers of free radicals to build up which kill the cells. The neural cell damage that is caused by excessive aspartate and glutamate is the reason they are referred to as 'excitotoxins': they 'excite' or stimulate the neural cells to death.


From http://smart-drugs.net/ias-excitotoxins.htm [smart-drugs.net]:

MSG/aspartame defenders also like to point out that glutamate and aspartate are natural constituents of food protein, which is generally considered safe, so why the concern over MSG/aspartame (2)? Yet there is a key difference between food-derived glutamate/aspartate and MSG/aspartame. Food glutamate/aspartate comes in the form of proteins, which contain 20 other amino acids, and take time to digest, slowing the release of protein bound glutamate/aspartate like a "timed-release capsule." This in turn moderates the rise in blood levels of glutamate/aspartate. Also, when glutamate and aspartate are received by the liver (first stop after intestinal absorption) along with 20 other aminos, they are used to make various proteins. This also moderates the rise in blood glutamate/aspartate levels. Yet when the single amino MSG is rapidly absorbed (especially in solution - e.g. soups, sauces and gravies), not requiring digestion, human and animal experiments show rapid rises in glutamate, 5 to 20 times normal blood levels (2). Aspartame is a dipeptide - a union of 2 aminos- and there exist special di-and tripeptide intestinal absorption pathways that allow rapid and efficient absorption (21). The dipeptides are then separated into free aminos, and as with free MSG there will be a rapid rise in blood aspartate. Thus the characteristics of food-bound glutamate/aspartate and MSG/aspartame are completely different.

Another potentially dangerous additive..

[Anonymous Coward]

I've noticed that the use of sulfites is becoming quite common lately. These cause me and many others to get terrible headaches. If you've noticed you're getting more headaches in recent years start looking at your food/drink labels. It's certainly proved useful to me.