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Because leaving the house can be SO much effort.

In theory, buying a drink in a café is very lovely. Someone fishes the teabag out of the boiling hot water for you, doesn’t then leave it festering on your kitchen counter, and you get a big dose of people-watching thrown in – often at handsome men with big beards.

This is all great, but sometimes I get lazy. Sometimes leaving the house feels like a lot of effort. You have to actually put on clothes, which means finding something clean, un-crumpled and ideally slightly coordinated. (If not, just without holes in rude places is a good failsafe). You have to look in the mirror to decide where on the passable scale you fall. You have to find shoes, close the windows, turn off the TV, and actually get to the café or shop.

I mean, it’s exhausting just listing it all.

Plus, you then have to pay for the inconvenience of having to put on clean underwear and leave the house. And the cost soon adds up: research by LiveLighter shows that buying just one soft drink a day will set you back $1095 a year on average.

The problem is that if you haven’t been to the supermarket, the options for making a really tasty cold drink at home are pretty limited. To one: water.

Just as an FYI, this post is an advertorial for SodaStream. But all opinions expressed by the author are 100 per cent authentic and written in their own words.

But there is a way to make water more exciting without using any more exertion than walking into your kitchen. The new SodaStream PLAY Drinks Maker does just this in three steps:

1. Fill the carbonating bottle up with water. (It’s BPA-free, and using this instead of buying drinks saves the average Australian family up to 2,190 bottles or cans over the bottle’s three-year lifespan. Cool).

2. Add fizz. The really fun bit. The refillable gas cylinder whizzes bubbles in.

3. Pick your flavour. Sorry water, we still love you – but just slightly more when you taste of Summer Lemon, or any one of the other 40+ flavours in the range.

And if you feel like staying in instead of heading to a bar, you can even make your own bespoke alcoholic cocktails with these recipes: http://www.sodastream.com.au/recipes

The other great thing about the new PLAY Drinks Maker is that it really injects a chic café appearance into your kitchen. It was designed by Yves Béhar – the creative genius behind Jawbone wearable technology, who’s also worked for Prada, Puma and Swarovski. In short, he knows what looks good.

Fans of SodaStream will note a couple of key design improvements: the ‘auto-lift’ slider, which returns the device to its original position after carbonation (basically making it a lot slicker to use), and a ‘snap-lock’ mechanism that locks it all in place in the push of a button. The new PLAY Drinks Maker also comes with one starter gas cylinder and one carbonating bottle so you start making sparkling drinks instantly.

But if you’ve never used a SodaStream before, the main thing to know is this: your water will taste awesome. And you don’t even have to get dressed to use it. Result.

See some of the kinds of flavour combinations you can make with the SodaStream below…

Leading the market in technological advancements and quality products, the SodaStream system enables users to carbonate water, add flavour, and enjoy better-for-you soda water or flavoured sparkling water at home, just the way they like it. SodaStream is the world’s largest manufacturer, distributor and marketer of home carbonation systems with Drinks Makers being sold in over 60,000 retail stores, in 45 countries worldwide.

Today, SodaStream is leading a revolution against bottled and canned beverages, providing consumers with better-for-you and better-for-the-planet alternatives to store bought drinks.

SodaStream – make water exciting with SMART. SIMPLE. BUBBLES.

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