Price Drop!
Woot Woot!! Even better price as of 1:33am CT - a $10 refund is coming your way folks! Happy Holidays!
Anyone have experience with the refurbish process?
If it’s all new parts that mold could build up in, but the mechanism that didn’t touch fluid is reused, I would be interested.
90 day warranty is a concern with any Ninja product. Very hit and miss on reliability, especially cutting edge.
I ordered a new unit yesterday. Hence why I ask.
Based on my last experience with a woot refurb (nugget ice maker) that arrived looking like someone had used it as a stepstool and tested a lemon zester on several areas to see how much paint they could remove, I won’t be trusting anything refurbished from woot anymore. They did eventually take it back, but took their grand time responding to messages and getting me a return label. The box that it arrived in from the “refurbisher” was strapped together by nylon bands making a return very difficult.
Thanks, that’s exactly what I feared.
I think it would benefit Woot to give some details on refurbishing process for each item. Especially items that touch food, ears, etc.
I got one of these last time they came up and mine looked like new. we have used a number of times and it still works great.
Where?
It’s a refund for people who bought the item earlier. The current price is the new discounted price. If you purchased this at the higher price, check your email.
(Please Note: I’m not employed by Woot, but I volunteer to help in the forums.)
Oh ok thank you
Damn, i paid $250 for this thru woot a little while ago
The price really has cut down on this. Last time I saw it I think it was about $215, give or take $5? That’s $65 more than this.
Of course, that is not including the tumblers, which woot is valuing at $20 added in the partner deal for this event ($170 total, minus $150 for just the machine in this offer), but I am not sure if they are worth it.
On the one hand, if you really have your heart set on the Ninja branded cup or want an insulated cup with the bubble lid, which other brands do not seem to sell, Ninja values the same cup in a different color at $30 (and don’t have any in stock right now and other brand name tumblers like Stanley are similarly expensive.
On the other hand, if you don’t care about branding or bubble tops, there are other cups available for cheaper on a per piece basis.
Freshimage 16 ounce double walled insulated tumblers are 2 for $10 or $16 for 4 at the moment. All plastic without tops, but in being all plastic you can see through them and see the slushi. Of couse, the stainless steel ones might be better for hot drinks since some people have concerns about plasticizers leeching into hot drinks.
However, sometimes you can find deals on other metal insulated tumblers too. Woot was selling these stainless steel Konokyo 18 OZ tumblers for $5 each as cyber monday leftovers, although they are sold out by now.
Keep in mind that when looking for other cups, you want to make sure it is small enough to fit under the spout. I reckon you can probably buy a tumbler that is slightly larger than 16 ounces, since I doubt the bubble tops count towards holding capacity, but I am not sure.
Oh, and if you are looking for those matching brand name brownie points, do not forget to consider buying the matching tote bag.
In any case, point is, I reckon the Ninja cups are at least worth $10 if not the full $20, so this is somewhere in the ballpark of $45 to $55 cheaper (depending on how much you value the cups) than last time I saw it. Still though, I reckon Woot buyers got a better price than people who bought it at Costco or Ninja’s website.
As for me, I’ll get it without the cups since I already have insulated tumblers.
So for anybody who bought one of these things and is now wondering what to make with it for an affordable price, I wanted to point out two things. The first is that woot sometimes has deals on Torani soda syrup, like this strawberry syrup right now:
This facebook post suggests a 5:1 water to syrup ratio, and this tiktok video suggests a 5:2 ratio. Strawberry syrup might also be useful for the milkshake function, since of course, the three most popular flavors of milkshake are strawberry, chocolate and vanilla.
The other is that Ninja also has a Blue Raspberry Fruit Punch Slushi recipe, which is basically just blue raspberry fruit punch. In other words, you can just use Kool-Aid or similar product. Do not forget to stir in enough sugar or allulose to help it slush though, unless you want to end up like this poor sap who tried to slush sugar free snow-cone syrup and ended up with a block of ice stalling his motor on an icee machine. Alluose is an F.D.A. approved zero calorie sweetener that apparently does not spike blood glucose levels, making it a potentially good alternative for dieters and diabetics. There are allegedly other ways to get sugar free slush, but alluose is manufacturer tested because Ninja has a variety of sugar-free alluose based recipes on their website.
Before I move on to strictly discussing economy, which will be based on the cost of sugar since Icees are not calorie free or offered in a diet version, one final note is on alluose is not usually as sweet as sugar, so depending on what kind you get, you may need more of it than you would use of sugar to achieve the same level of sweetness. The typical recommendation seems to be to substitute 1 and â…“ cups of alluose for each cup of sugar (although some formulations are made to be 1:1 substitutes, so check your label).
Of course, I suppose you could use other flavors of syrup and punch as well, and in this regard, although Flavor Aid does not currently offer Blue Raspberry, they do offer Cherry flavor which is just as if not more popular as a slush flavor, as well as a few others. Costing $17.44 for 72 packets on the mothership, it comes out to ~24¢ per packet, and each packet makes two quarts of punch (sans sweetener) so you shall be able to slush it for a while. It is probably also worth noting that tropical punch Flavor Aid has a coupon which lowers the price down to $14.38 for 72 packets, which is ~20¢ per packet. The last of the available Flavor Aid flavors I would like to mention is Grape, which is just a few cents more expensive than the cherry and also a noteworthy flavor too. They make some lime-cucumber too, but I don’t like the sound of a cucumber slush, and insofar as lime goes, I figure you’d be better off juicing real limes. Renegade Kitchen has a lemon-lime soda syrup recipe you can follow.
That does not include the cost of sugar, but woot is selling this 20 ounce canister N’Joy cane sugar for $2.
That’s 80¢ per cup, which is the recommended amount of sugar suggested on the back of a kool-aid packet.
Just to cross-reference, Fizz Creations sells licensed Icee branded syrup for their icee branded slush machines which is probably the closest thing you can find at home. They sell it for use with their own icee machines, although the cheaper of the two is a $100 model which uses an ice bucket, and the one with a chiller like the Ninja currently costs $300 on the mothership. Granted, the Icee pro slushie machine also makes ice-cream (probably soft-serve style), so not quite the same, but meh.
I find it interesting not to actually use with the Ninja (it does not seem cost effective), but to use as a frame of reference for reverse engineering: A 6.2 ounce bottle of syrup with 27 ounces of water makes 33 ounces of pre-slushed fluid with 106 grams (.5277 cups) of sugar. Keeping in mind that one quart is 32 ounces, this is close enough to the kool-aid that I am thinking a proper Icee is essentially slushed kool-aid,with one caveat.
Of course, regarding that caveat, something I did not realize before buying this is that Icees are also carbonated so you might also want to get a Soda Stream setup going the next time woot offers one so you can mix the punch into carbonated water if you are looking to copy either of those, and of course, there is a cost to carbonating water.
C-net estimates it costs 9 cents to carbonate 12 ounces of fluid with a soda stream, which comes out to 96¢ to carbonate two quarts of water for your unslushed punch at home. It is something you can skip strictly speaking. J & J snacks, the company that owns Icees, also makes Slush Puppies with the distinction, aside from the choice of similarly stylized mammilian mascot, is that slush puppies are not carbonated. However I think it is worth mentioning since I reckon most people are aiming to imitate Icee or Slurpee, with other contenders being a distant aforethought.
Given that the Ninja Slushi has 23% of extra headroom from the fill line, I estimate you get close to (but not quite) 2.5 quarts of slush per dollar if you use the tropical punch flavor aid with the n’joy sugar at this pricing. Which is not to say that the N’Joy sugar is the most economical option there is, but it’s just what’s on woot right now. If you do things how I suggested, then the cost ends up being $1.96 cents to get 2.5 quarts of comparable end product.
Keeping in mind that 7–11 has a promotion to get any medium, large or extra large Slurpee for $2.50, and an extra large Slurpee is possibly as large as 44 ounces depending on the store, you are getting almost double the slush for 54¢ less per batch of comparable product, and of course, this slurpee promotion is not the normal price for an extra large, so the nominal savings is likely even larger. However, I do not personally know how much it normally costs to get any size of slurpee, so I could not tell you how much more you might expect to save regularly. However, even with 7–11’s promotional pricing, the potential savings seems quite large.
That should not be surprising I suppose. With electrical and overhead costs, as well as splitting profits two ways, it probably costs a good chunk of change. Speaking of electricity, I suppose you shall be paying for that yourself.
U.S. national average cost of residential electricity is 18.07 cents per kilowatt hour as of this september, and the Ninja Slushi uses 200 watts. If you want to keep your drinks cold for 12 hours, as the device advertises as the maximum duration it will keep drinks chilled, it will cost just under 43.4¢. If however, you just want to run it long enough to freeze (which is up to 30 minutes according to Ninja’s blue raspberry recipe), then it only costs 1.807¢. So tack 2–44¢ onto the cost of the slush depending on how long you keep it running, to get a final total of $1.98–$2.42. The upper end of that range is getting closer to the $2.50 mark it costs to buy an official icee rather than trying to copy it with punch, but even so, you are still getting double the amount, and do not have to worry about it melting over the course of a party.
Speaking of it costing 1.807¢ cents to slush, my two cents cost more than slushing time, so it is about time for me to bow out. However, before I go, I thought it was worth noting that since I was discussing cups earlier, Fizz Creation sells icee branded paper cups to complete the illusion. At $15 for 20 9-ounce cups, that’s 75¢ per cup which is ridiculous, but it is a fun little way to complete the illusion if you are showing off for a party that serves more than just a couple of people. Well, maybe not complete the illusion, since they have no bubble tops and made the strange decision to include paper straws rather than the plastic scoopy ones you get with real icees.
I hope this info. helps somebody out.