Y'know, if you look you can find the darnedest things.

I present for your consideration: www.sodaclubusa.com

I found this through a review on "Cooking for Engineers". I saw it and thought, if this thing is half that good it just may be something I need to get. Come to find out, you can get them at, of all places, the Boater's World store up at Hamilton Place. (Beside Lowe's, and in front of Home Despot) On the website the basic kit for the Fountain Jet is something like $110 plus shipping. You can get the machine, two carbonating bottles and two bottles of the syrup mix for $85 if you go out to the mall. I know. I just did it.

Dead easy to put together and operate. However, I would recommend that unless you have well water that's five degrees over freezing, chill your water before you fizzify it. It'll hold more CO2 that way, making for better fizzness.

Taste test on the Diet Cola flavor: Pretty damned good, actually, and I say that as a Diet Coke addict of twenty-four years standing. They have bunches of different flavors for colas (including copies of Mountain Dew, Dr. Pepper, Sprite, many fruit flavors, both in regular and diet forms). You could also just fizzify your water and put in a couple of Lipton's To Go sugar free tea packets, the ones meant for 20 oz water bottles. Those use Splenda too. Carbonated iced tea, anyone? Or of course you can put in straight lemon or lime juice, or do it half and half with orange juice. I'm currently three quarters of the way through my first liter of the Diet and it's still fizzy, so that gives you some idea of the stamina of the fizzifying process.

I won't have any problems recommending this machine, nor using it on a daily basis.

The numbers: When I first saw the Soda Club website I got out my calculator and figured out about how much I must spend on Diet Coke every year, and came out with about $1100. This is figuring on 9 liters per week, at a current cost average of $1.50/liter. As with everything else, the prices have been going up. The Soda Club machine with one CO2 bottle (good for about 110 fizzifying rounds) and two carbonating bottles ($11 for 2, if you want extras) and two bottles of the Diet Cola syrup ($4 / each) came out to $85 from Boater's World, Chattanooga. The bottles of syrup do 12 liters each, so that's 33 cents per liter. When your CO2 cylinder is empty, you take it back to Boater's World to exchange it, and pay something like $20 for a filled one. As it's good for about 3 months worth of fizzifying, I'm not complaining. All in all, you're talking about 50 cents per liter of cola.

You do have to replace the carbonating bottles if they become scratched up or otherwise compromised, but that's due to the fact that you're filling these things with pressurized CO2. But as the bottles are only $11 for 2, that's fine by me. A small price to pay to prevent kerblooey.

Anyway, given my cola habits -- I could be a lab rat for Nutrasweet -- and the fact I'm constantly having to buy more Diet Coke, leading to massive wastage of plastic bottles, not to mention $1100/year, this thing is the bee's knees. I'll still have to drink Diet Coke at work since these bottles won't fit in my lunch box, but at home I'm making my own. And at 1/3 of the cost baby, yeah!