Endurism Spotlight: Aarke Carbonator 3

A crate of sparkling water weighs about nine kilos. You haul it up the stairs, drink it in a week, then haul the empties back down. A household that drinks a litre a day buys that crate fifty times a year.

The money

Branded sparkling water costs around €1,42 a litre in a Dutch supermarket. At a litre a day that is €518 a year. Over ten years you spend more than €5.000 on water and the plastic it came in. The water is tap-grade. You are paying for the bubbles and the bottle.

The Aarke Carbonator 3 puts the bubbles in yourself. It costs €209. A 60-litre CO2 cylinder refills for €12,99, which works out to about €0,22 a litre. Fill from the tap and your sparkling water lands near €0,28 a litre once the machine is paid off. That is a fifth of the supermarket price. The €209 pays for itself in under six months.

The object

The Carbonator 3 is a block of stainless steel with no electronics and no battery. You screw in a standard CO2 cylinder and pull the lever. The pressure does the rest. There is nothing to plug in and nothing to charge. The mechanism is the same one bars have used for a century.

Steel does not yellow or crack the way the plastic machines do. The cylinders are the SodaStream standard, so refills are available at any supermarket and most hardware shops. Aarke sells replacement parts for the pieces that wear.

The math

The cheapest supermarket own-brand sparkling runs closer to €0,35 a litre. Against the bargain crates the cash gap narrows. The machine still ends the hauling and the wall of empty bottles by the door.

Ownership

A steel Carbonator keeps a resale value on Marktplaats. Buy the steel version once and it outlives three plastic sparkling machines. It sits on the counter looking like real equipment. The lever gets smoother with use.

The verdict: €209 of steel buys back more than €4.000 in bottled water over a decade.