| So, you want to setup a home soda fountain do you? Well,
you have come to the right place. The chief ingredient you will need is
time; time to locate the parts, time to go back and get the parts you missed the first time
around, time to set it up, and so on. (I'm not kidding... I made seven
trips to Home Depot and Lowes.) Don't try to do it all in one day though;
I spent a couple of afternoons working on it over a period of two weeks. The first step is to figure out
what kind of system you want to install! There are several types,
which you can see below:
- Pre-mix: This is the type of system you commonly see at
fairgrounds or in cheap seedy places. The soda comes premixed and ready to drink
inside metal canisters. The soda exits via a dip-tube, because CO2
gas pushes down on the top of the soda. It usually passes through a
cold-plate in the ice bin, and out of simple dispensers. The benefit is
that only CO2 is required to make the thing work (and ice). But the soda
doesn't taste as good to many people, and you have to buy the stuff from
the drink companies and they aren't very keen about delivering to home
users. In fact, I can promise you that you won't ever be able to find a
stable supply of premix for a home dispenser unless you manage to make
it yourself.
Canisters, used to hold soda:
- Post-mix w/ice bin: This is the type of system I have personally.
It consists of three parts. First, you have a carbonator that takes
average cold tap water and combines it with CO2 gas to produce soda
water. Then you have syrup pumps, which operate under the power of CO2
gas. Lastly, you have the dispensing unit, which has a cold-plate in the
bottom of it's ice bin, then two electronic valves that control the
amount of syrup vs soda water that gets dispensed when activated (some
have push-buttons on the front, others have metal tabs in the back that
you press your cup against.) These units are found in convenience stores
and so on. You must fill the ice bin with ice every few days. You
can buy an ice machine that sits on top of the ice bin and fills it with
ice automatically, but those cost about $2000 new, and I haven't found a
good source for them used. If ice is a real problem, buy a used ice
machine and stick it in your garage. You can operate this unit without
ice if you fill your glass with ice before getting soda.
- Post-mix, refrigerated: This is the same type of system as
stated above, except there is no ice-bin... instead, you pour about 10
gallons of water into the unit. A small pump keeps the water circulating
between the soda tubes and the refrigeration tubes, which operate much
like a small office refrigerator, with a compressor and everything. Some
of the water will form a solid block of ice, known as the "ice
reservoir". The
benefit is that you don't have to keep pouring ice into the unit to make
it work. The drawback is that you have yet another system to
worry about, one that uses freon. But no ice is required
For the vast majority of home users, the Post-mix system with ice bin
will be the preferred method. The bin should be insulated, so you can get
away with adding ice only every few days, or possibly even every week if
the insulation is really good and you load the bin down with lots of ice.
Post-mix systems with a refrigeration unit are harder to find, impossible
to service yourself, weigh a lot more, cost more to run, and are generally
a pain. But if you can invest the effort, they are a lot easier to use on
a daily basis, since they need no ice.
First of all, you must conceptualize young
grasshoppa! Onward to victory!
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