Home carbonation system

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By Becky Stern
Posted 2007/08/29 @ 6:00 am
Category General

Kevin Kelly published a tutorial on making your own carbonated beverages by Alastair Ong.

In this really terrific tutorial he writes,

“I drink a lot of seltzer. So much that my fiancee says I couldn’t survive without bubbles in my water. After trying a SodaClub home soda maker (picture above right) and realizing it would cost $70 to buy a special part for it, I found a really detailed resource for building my own, simple home carbonation system for under a $100 using a CO2 tank, regulator, hose and a carbonator cap. It took ten minutes to build. I love having very good homemade soda on the cheap and not having to lug around seltzer bottles or worry about it going flat. With a scuba-like tank in the kitchen, guests always ask “What is that?!” and I really love demonstrating.”

Home carbonation system at Cool Tools – Link.

BY Becky Stern

Becky Stern is head of wearable electronics at Adafruit Industries. Her personal site: sternlab.org

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6 Responses to Home carbonation system

Unomi on August 29th, 2007 at 6:43 am said:

Hey, I’m not into carbonating anything but do know the SodaClub brand. What I’m curious about is, is it possible to re-carbonate soda gone flat (like any regular store soda)?

Thanks.

- Unomi -

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jswilson64 on August 29th, 2007 at 7:13 am said:

I’ve never done it, but from a physics/chemistry standpoint, re-carbonating it once it has gone flat is pretty much the same as carbonating it at the bottling plant.

For a smaller-scale carbonation, you could use dry ice. Take your 2 or 3 liter flat soda, drop a few chips in, and screw the top down. You have to be careful, though, because you can’t regulate the pressure like you can in the article linked above, and you might wind up with a sticky soda bomb on your hands.

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Austringer on August 29th, 2007 at 8:21 am said:

Sure.

Many home brewers use this sort of system with stainless steel soda kegs and force carbonate their beer rather than bottle condition.

There are tables out there that let you cross reference desired volumes of CO2 you want in your beer, it’s temperature and what you should set your regulator at. Rather than crank it up to 50 PSI I usually just set it to 10-15 PSI and let it all sit overnight.

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Sinistrad on August 29th, 2007 at 1:48 pm said:

Keep in mind that the regulator gauge is an indicator of pressure in the tank. It is *not* an indicator as to how much CO2 is left (as indicated in the article).

The pressure in the tank will vary based on temperature, and will quickly fall once there’s no more liquid CO2 left.

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wa8wte on August 29th, 2007 at 3:21 pm said:

Sherlock Holmes and Watson had a system a little like this – it was called a “Gasogene” and used dry chemicals to make seltzer out of London tap water…
-wa8wte

Reply ↓
wa8wte on August 29th, 2007 at 3:22 pm said:

Sherlock Holmes and Watson had a system a little like this – it was called a “Gasogene” and used dry chemicals to make seltzer out of London tap water…
-wa8wte

Reply ↓