Fizz-Giz Soda Maker Operating Instructions. How To Make Soda Stream From Your New Seltzer Maker.

Quickie Instructions For Using Your Fizz Giz

1) Fill your bottle with the drink you wanna carbonate. Leave a 2" deep headspace above the liquid at the top. Deeper headspace yields quicker carbonation.
2) Loosely mount a Fizz Giz cap on the bottle. Squeeze the bottle forcing the air out the top (AKA "burping"), then tighten the Fizz Giz bottle cap.
3) Insert the tip of the Fizz Giz dispenser nozzle into the guidehole (center of the Fizz Giz bottle cap) and press the thumb button.
4) The bottle will harden and the CO₂ flow will stop. Great! But you're not done yet. Shake the bottle well until it softens fully.
5) Repeat steps 3 & 4 twice more. On subsequent repetitions, you'll notice the bottle doesn't get as soft after shaking. Feel free to do as many rep's as you want. But generally, 3 cycles is sufficient. And if your beverage is already cold, 2 will likely suffice.

Thorough Instructions For Using Your Fizz Giz

The Fizz Giz is meant to be an economical, eco-friendly, easy to use and extremely reliable home carbonation alternative. You will probably take it out of the box, load up a CO₂ cartridge and carbonate yourself some seltzer water within minutes without ever reading these instructions. Should you experience difficulties, though, this document should put you in the fizzy fairly quickly. Relax. It's so simple, most kids catch on right off the bat.

Soda bottles are made from PET, a very strong type of plastic that first came into use nearly 40-years ago. For most of that time, plastic soda bottles had the same size threaded connections on the mouth of the bottle and all of them used the same 28-mm cap. The Coca-Cola company changed their plastic caps and bottles in 2008. Fizz Giz caps do not fit the new Coca-Cola bottles. So don't use Coca-Cola bottles. Use PET soda bottles from other soft drink companies like Pepsi. If you look at and compare two bottle caps side by side - one Coke product, the other not - you'll see instantly the size difference and will understand why the caps are no longer interchangeable. Here's a list of bottles to avoid: Coke, Fresca, Sprite, Mr Pibb, Barqs, Mello Yello and Fanta. These are all Coca Cola products.

Use a light touch. Don't press too hard when inserting the nozzle tip into the center guide hole on the Fizz Giz cap. Why? Well, #1, it's plastic, it's small and it doesn't take much force to break it. And #2, you don't want the nozzle tip to touch the bottom of the guidehole. Doing so is like holding your finger against the nozzle tip - it stops the "air" from coming out. It is extremely easy to halt the flow of CO₂ from the nozzle tip. You can do so with your little finger. Go ahead. Try it. Depressing the thumb button will start the flow of gas. The flow will halt if you just barely touch the tip of the nozzle with your finger. The tiniest push with your finger tip, the lightest force you can apply will shut off the flow. This is by design and is meant to make the product safe and easy to use. So when you insert the nozzle tip into the guidehole in the center of the Fizz Giz cap, insert it straight into the hole and do not press hard. Don't worry. You will get an effective seal between the nozzle tip and the rubber valve. The weight of the dispenser alone is sufficient force to make a good seal. Pressing hard with undue force may cause the point of the dispenser to penetrate too deeply and come in contact with the rubber valve plug. If that happens, the flow of CO₂ gas will stop and you won't carbonate anything. If you suspect this happens, withdraw the dispenser tip, re-insert gently, keeping it straight, and try again.

You may hold the bottle in any configuration while dispensing CO₂ - upside down, sideways (horizontally) or right-side-up - all work fine. Just remember, Fizz Giz caps seal best under pressure. Until you pressurize the bottle a bit, keeping it right side up will avoid any drips. Fizz Giz caps seal well under pressure, but for long term storage replace Fizz Giz caps with ordinary caps after carbonation.

Do not worry about the bottle popping in your hands like a balloon when dispensing CO₂ from a the Fizz Giz dispenser. It has a built-in pressure regulator that dispenses the same pressure used at the bottling plant. The Fizz Giz is preset to a delivery pressure which will place 4-volumes of CO₂ into your prepared beverage. That's about 8-grams of CO₂ per liter - the industry standard carbonation level. This is true regardless of whether you are simply making seltzer water, carbonating natural fruit juice, Kool-Aid® or milk. Chilled beverages accept CO₂ more readily. So cool your beverage first in the fridge for quickest results. But water right out-a-the cold water tap works pretty good too.

The Fizz Giz CO₂ dispenser and valve caps are meant to be used in unison. Please do not use the dispenser with caps not supplied by our company. Use only 16-gram food grade CO₂ cartridges with 8.3mm necks in the Fizz Giz CO₂ dispenser. CO₂ cartridges are used in a variety of applications, many of which do not require clean CO₂. Cartridges intended for use in BB-guns, paintball guns and life vests may contain small amounts of petro-based oil lubricants left over from the manufacturing process. Avoid them. You do not want your soft drinks tasting like kerosene cocktails. Googling for "food grade co2" will turn up more material on the subject than you'll ever read (perform this Google search now). Cartridges with 8.3mm necks contain pure clean food grade CO₂ and are sold in bike shops worldwide.

Carbonating drinks requires 2-3 injection cycles. When you inject CO₂ into a bottle, some of it mixes with the liquid, but most of it goes into the headspace above the liquid. The CO₂ in the headspace will slowly be absorbed by the liquid until equilibrium is reached. But who wants to sit it on the shelf and wait 2-days for Physics to finish it's job? You can speed that process up immensely with fierce agitation. When you start dispensing CO₂, the flow will stop as the pressure reaches the design level and the bottle gets hard. No more CO₂ will go in the bottle until you thoroughly mix the CO₂ you just put in there. As you shake it, you can literally feel the bottle pressure drop in your hand. Keep shaking until the bottle stops getting softer. Repeat the process a 2nd time, injecting CO₂ then shaking to mix it. Again, the bottle will soften while you're shaking it - but not as much this time as it did the first time. When you think the bottle is as soft as it's gonna get, you're ready for a 3rd cycle. You probably won't get much CO₂ in the bottle on your 3rd time around. But go ahead & try. And when you shake it, it won't soften up much at all. You are welcome to repeat the cycle as many times as you wish. You will NOT get too much CO₂ in the bottle. The Fizz Giz dispenser will NOT allow you to pop a bottle regardless of how many cycles you perform. The built-in pressure regulator prevents you from putting in too much pressure. The bottle is capable of holding 4-times as much pressure as the Fizz Giz dispenser is capable of delivering.

One more thing, don't overfill bottles with the homebrew you're about to carbonate. Leave a 2" headspace at the top. You wanna leave this space to give the CO₂ somewhere to go when you inject it. After pouring your beverage into the bottle, you're ready to carbonate. Screw a Fizz Giz cap on loosely, burp the air from the headspace above the liquid by squeezing the bottle to force out the air. While holding the bottle in its slightly collapsed state, tighten up the cap while the air is gone. Then do your carbonating. Overfilling the bottles with beverage allows only a tiny bit of CO₂ to be injected into the drink during each squirt-shake cycle. Injecting small amounts of CO₂ each cycle means more cycles will be needed in order to fully carbonate your drink. Avoid this trap by leaving yourself some space above the liquid when pouring your uncarbonated beverage into the bottle. Think of it as giving yourself a little "working room".

Installing CO₂ cartridges in the dispenser. The dispenser unscrews into 2 parts. The front section contains the pressure regulator and the nozzle tip. The back section is just a cup or canister for holding the CO₂ cartridge. Open by grasping the foremost section of the dispenser in one hand. Using your other hand, unscrew the back end canister. Place a CO₂ cartridge in the canister and screw it back on to the front end tightly and securely. This operation punctures the seal on disposable CO₂ cartridges (or depresses the release valve stem on refillable cartridges). If using a disposable cartridge, do not unscrew the back end canister until the contents of the cartridge are exhausted or you will lose the CO₂ inside. If using a refillable cartridge, you may remove it anytime you wish, regardless of whether it's contents have been fully spent.