Change 1, Week 1

Change 1, Week 1: Decrease the amount of soda we purchase.

Matt and I are soda fiends. FIENDS. We don’t drink it as often as some, but we drink more than enough (around 32 oz per day, sometimes more). Eventually, we’ll decrease the amount we consume, but for now we’ll concentrate on the amount we purchase.

Why do we want to decrease the amount of soda we purchase?
There are two reasons.

1. The environment. We’re currently creating an obscene amount of unnecessary waste in the form of plastic/paper/Styrofoam cups, plastic lids, straws, bottles, and cans. We’re indirectly consuming fuel and various packaging to get the soda to the store/restaurant in the first place.
2. Money. Let’s look at the math. If a 32 oz “serving” of soda costs 1$ and both of us drink at least 1 serving per day, that’s 730$ spent in a year!

How are we going to decrease the amount of soda we purchase?
By making our own! There are many ways to make your own soda. Emily from Under $1000 Per Month uses water kefir.  Others brew with a combination of dry yeast, water, and sugar. We decided to go with the SodaStream.

What is the SodaStream?

The SodaStream is a compact man-powered machine that is connected to a CO2 tank. Most of the components are plastic. However, they are BPA free, reusable, and recyclable. The small CO2 tank can produce about 60L of soda while the medium tank can produce around 110L.

When a tank is empty, we have the option of ordering a new tank through SodaStream and letting UPS pick it up (kind of a waste), or we can go to a local distributor of the tanks and exchange it. Regardless of the method we use, the tanks will be returned to SodaStream for inspection and refilling—they’ll continue to be used unless they have been damaged or contaminated in some way.

The water can be consumed as straight seltzer, flavored seltzer, or soda. SodaStream has a line of syrups available as well as seltzer fruit essences.

What do you think?
Matt and I bought one last week and began using it on Sunday. We went with the Fountain Jet Soda Value Kit for 149.99$ which comes with: the unit, 4-1L soda bottles, 2-60L CO2 tanks, 5 sodamix syrups (which make 12L soda each), and a 12 piece sample pack of 1L sodamix syrups. (We found a coupon code for free shipping.)

Over the past few days of testing the SodaStream, we’ve decided this was a good buy. It was a hit the first time we used it, and everyone loved it at our party last night. The good thing about the party is we only made 3L of soda and nothing went to waste! Normally we would buy 4 or 5 different flavored sodas (in 2L bottles) and all but the diets would go to waste because the non-diets that weren’t consumed by our guests would not be consumed by us. There was none of that last night.

Here’s a video of a sample survey (Thank you, Jackie & Josie!):


If kids love it, it must be good! The adults also enjoyed all the flavors we sampled.

While the initial cost may seem large, it should even out over time if we continue to use it and not buy soda elsewhere. Also, we don’t have to use their syrups. I’ve already Googled recipes and found some we will be trying—plus, I love to experiment.

Overall, we give it 4 ½ stars. The reason for this is that the syrup measuring cup is poorly designed and can lead to waste. I’ll update in a month and again in 3 to see if we still love it!

*Note: We paid cold, hard cash for this product. In researching this product, we decided it would be a good holiday gift for ourselves—this is the only thing we spent money on for one another. SodaStream did not give us anything for free and is currently unaware of this review. The coupon was found on RetailMeNot.com.