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Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff from house stuff works dot com, where

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Speaker 1: smart happens. Him Marshall Brain with today's question, is it

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Speaker 1: possible to make carbonated water at home? As I've mentioned before,

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Speaker 1: I happen to be on a diet at the moment,

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Speaker 1: and one thing I enjoy while on this diet is

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Speaker 1: drinking carbonated water. You also know it as club soda

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Speaker 1: or seltzer. You can buy it at the grocery store,

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Speaker 1: and from a dieting perspective, it's nice because it has

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Speaker 1: a slightly different flavor than normal water does. It has

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Speaker 1: a little bit of texture if you want to call

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Speaker 1: it that, because it has the bubbles, and obviously it

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Speaker 1: has zero calories, which is great. The problem with club

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Speaker 1: soda is that it seems ridiculously expensive. For example, where

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Speaker 1: I get it, it's a dollar twenty nine for a

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Speaker 1: two lead bottle. You might be able to find it

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Speaker 1: for a little less than that, but a dollar for

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Speaker 1: two leaders is probably as low as it goes. When

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Speaker 1: you think about paying a dollar for something that costs

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Speaker 1: a penny coming out of the tap, or even five

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Speaker 1: cents when you filter it yourself, it seems like a

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Speaker 1: pretty high markup. So the obvious question arises, could you

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Speaker 1: make carbonated water at home? And the answer is yes,

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Speaker 1: you can. You need some equipment. The fact is that

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Speaker 1: just about every restaurant you've ever been to that serves

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Speaker 1: soda makes its own carbonated water. You just need a

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Speaker 1: little equipment and a little expertise, and you could be

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Speaker 1: making your own club soda at home for something like

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Speaker 1: a dime for two leaders or maybe less. All that

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Speaker 1: you need is a bottle that can handle pressure, some

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Speaker 1: cold tap water, preferably filtered, and then a way to

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Speaker 1: pressurize the bottle with carbon dioxide. And usually you do

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Speaker 1: that with a CEO two tank. So one way to

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Speaker 1: carbonate water at home is to buy a standard size

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Speaker 1: beverage type CEO two tank with a regulator and a

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Speaker 1: hose on it and use that hose to pressure rise

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Speaker 1: a bottle that's filled with cold tap water. And you

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Speaker 1: can buy these tanks there. You know, they're about the

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Speaker 1: size of a normal scuba tank, maybe a little smaller,

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Speaker 1: and they hold pressurized carbon dioxide. You can buy them

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Speaker 1: or rent them from beverage distributors in your area because

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Speaker 1: this is a standard thing that they would use at

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Speaker 1: a bar or a restaurant to make their own carbonated water,

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Speaker 1: you know, and you might have to spend fifty dollars

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Speaker 1: or a hundred dollars to get the tank and the

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Speaker 1: regulator and the hose. But once you have that, it

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Speaker 1: only takes seconds to make carbonated water. If you go

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Speaker 1: on YouTube and look this up, or come to the

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Speaker 1: brain stuff blog where I have an article on it,

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Speaker 1: you can see that it. You know, you just put

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Speaker 1: the cold water in the bottle. You have a little

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Speaker 1: special cap that's gonna let the CEO two in but

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Speaker 1: not let it back out. You take your tank, you

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Speaker 1: run the CEO two into the bottle, you shake it up,

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Speaker 1: and a few seconds later that bottle of water is

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Speaker 1: carbonated water or club soda. It took only seconds to

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Speaker 1: do it. Now, if truth be told, this tank and

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Speaker 1: its regulator and the hose are not the prettiest things

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Speaker 1: you've ever seen in your life. Their industrial So there

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Speaker 1: are companies that now make kitchen appliance type things, the

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Speaker 1: kind of thing you could set on your kitchen counter

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Speaker 1: and it wouldn't look out of place. That carbonate water. Now,

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Speaker 1: these typically cost about a hundred dollars for the machine,

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Speaker 1: and then you pay for little cartridges that screw into

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Speaker 1: the machine. And this is more expensive, admittedly, because you're

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Speaker 1: paying more for the beauty of the thing, and the

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Speaker 1: cartridges cost a lot more than a big, standardized tank

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Speaker 1: of carbon dioxide does. But it's still an inexpensive, quick

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Speaker 1: and easy way to make carbonated water in your house

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Speaker 1: on a regular basis. What if you'd like to make

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Speaker 1: carbonated water one time or infrequently, and you don't want

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Speaker 1: to spend the money on the appliance or the industrial tank,

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Speaker 1: you just want to try it out well, then you

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Speaker 1: could make a rig with a little piece of tubing

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Speaker 1: and a couple of bottles. In one bottle you'd put

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Speaker 1: your cold water that you want to be carbonated, and

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Speaker 1: then in the other bottle you would mix the standard

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Speaker 1: vinegar and baking soda solution that you would use in

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Speaker 1: a science fair volcano project or something like that that's

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Speaker 1: going to produce a lot of carbon dioxide at pressure.

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Speaker 1: So you drill holes in a couple of soda bottle caps,

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Speaker 1: you run a piece of tubing between them, and you

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Speaker 1: glue them or silicone seal them into place. You put

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Speaker 1: your vinegar and your baking soda in one bottle, screw

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Speaker 1: that cap on. You put your cold water in the

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Speaker 1: other bottle, screw the cap on, and you let that

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Speaker 1: reaction pressurize both bottles, and in a few seconds you

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Speaker 1: have carbonated water on the fresh water side. And again,

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Speaker 1: if you go to YouTube where you come to the

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Speaker 1: brain stuff blog, you can look up how to do this.

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Speaker 1: There are lots of people on YouTube who have made

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Speaker 1: this little rig and demonstrate how to do it. And

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Speaker 1: just for thorough disks, we should mention the old fashioned

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Speaker 1: way of making carbonated soda. And that's the way they

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Speaker 1: used to make root beer. I've done this a couple

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Speaker 1: of times with the kids here in the brain household.

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Speaker 1: You take sugar and yeast and some kind of flavoring

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Speaker 1: like root beer flavoring, and you put it in a

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Speaker 1: soda bottle and you shake it up so that the

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Speaker 1: sugar and the yeast dissolve, and then you just let

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Speaker 1: it sit for a week or two and the yeast

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Speaker 1: will eat the sugar, produce carbon dioxide, pressurize that bottle,

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Speaker 1: and over time create a really fizzy root beer. Now

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Speaker 1: this isn't carbonated water per se, because it has sugar

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Speaker 1: and yeast in it, but it is a carbonated beverage,

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Speaker 1: and it's done using carbon dioxide produced by single cell organisms,

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Speaker 1: which are the yeast cells. So this is a valid

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Speaker 1: way to produce a fizzy carbonated beverage, even though it's

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Speaker 1: not club soda or carbonated water per se. And I

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Speaker 1: guess you could use this technique to create the two

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Speaker 1: bottle rig. You could have sugar and yeast on one

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Speaker 1: side producing carbon dioxide, and you could have cold water

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Speaker 1: on the other side that's absorbing that carbon dioxide and

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Speaker 1: becoming fizzy. It's just that this process would take several

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Speaker 1: days for the yeast to develop enough pressure to carbonate

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Speaker 1: the water on the right hand side. For more on

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Speaker 1: this and thousands of other topics, does that how stuff

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Speaker 1: works dot com and don't forget to check out the

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Speaker 1: brain stuff blog on the how stuff works dot com

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