Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I can't compare this to a soda stream because I've never had one of those. What I had was an addiction to Diet Coke which was easily translated into a harder addiction for La Croix and more recently Bubly. I fell in love with fizzy water. Hard. The amount of recycling was getting embarrassing. The UPS guy was getting annoyed with my endless orders from Amazon. After being trapped in the desert (ok, Las Vegas) with NONE of my choices available, I fell i love with plain soda water, seagrams and smart water. So now that I had given up on flavoring, I thought I might try the Drinkmate. HOLY SMOKES. It is now the most used appliance in my kitchen. I LOVE this thing. I was having a problem keeping my water shatteringly cold though (like you can get out of the fridge in cans--plastic just does not cut it for me, usually) I had a 33 ounce bottle of smartwater which I put in the freezer to get cold. Some ice formed on the inside of the plastic bottle. When I wanted to carbonate that water, I simply poured in into the drinkmate container and then squeezed the smartwater bottle. The ice inside the smart water bottle SHATTERED into lovely sheets of ice which stayed in the bottle. I carbonated what was poured--I carbonate a LOT, eight quarter second pumps at a time--uncap and repeat. i love my water to bite back. Then poured it BACK into the ice filled smart water bottle. HEAVEN for HOURS! Freezing, ice filled, bold bubbly water for days! I'm not close to the break even price point yet, but I dont care. This is better than anything I can find on the market and I can have it any time. I switch 2-3 bottle out a day so one is always chilling, one is in the fridge and one is on my desk. Yeah, I kinda dig it! Two notes--the Co2 cartridge it comes with is tiny. I received on a friday and it ran out on a Sunday. Granted I had no idea what I was doing and i DID sparke a ton of water, but be prepared, if you like this, you'll buy another cartridge quickly and I cannot find any with prime shipping, but the replacements did get here quickly. From now on i will be prepared to exchange the 60's locally at half the price. I've seen a few reviews saying that the water is not fizzy enough. That's an easy fix. Fizz it again. As long as you release the pressure (its' very intuitive after a few tries) you can load it back up and add more bubbles.