Mains-fed water cooler or packs: the cost per litre

A mains-fed water cooler is usually cheaper per litre once your team drinks a lot, but it needs a water supply, a technician and often a contract that runs for years. A pack-based cooler, such as the SPA Fountain with 10-litre SPA Reine packs, dispenses natural mineral water with no plumbing and no long-term contract. A bottle cooler with 18.9-litre bottles also works without a water connection.

What is the difference between a mains-fed water cooler and a pack-based cooler?

The difference is where the water comes from. A mains-fed (or plumbed-in) cooler is connected to your building's water supply, and it filters and chills your tap water. A pack-based cooler dispenses from a sealed container.

On the mains-fed side, these are the names you will meet in Belgium. Culligan rents and sells countertop and freestanding units with Firewall UVC technology and BioCote, hands-free dispensing and maintenance by its own technicians. BRITA offers the VIVREAU Top 50 and 85, which dispense room-temperature, chilled still, lightly sparkling and sparkling water. Aqualex operates in Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Germany. PHIL rents professional drinking-water systems. The model is the same everywhere: rent or buy, a fixed monthly fee and a technician who comes round.

In the small print: Culligan, Waterlogic and Eden Springs have belonged to the same group since 2022 and 2023. Culligan combined with Waterlogic in November 2022 and closed its purchase of Eden Springs on 29 December 2023. Three quotes from those three names are not three competitors.

Spadel launched the SPA Fountain on 23 April 2024, as a compact countertop unit and a freestanding unit. It runs on 10-litre SPA Reine packs, still natural mineral water. According to Spadel's press release, the Belgian office market has 49,000 water coolers that together dispense 30 million litres a year, a market Spadel describes as "dominated by the same historical players".

According to the spafountain.be FAQ, the SPA Fountain rental covers:

• delivery and installation;
• technical support;
• replacing the unit if needed;
• collection when you stop.

What it leaves out: the packs themselves. You order those separately.

There is a third option, the classic bottle cooler with 18.9-litre bottles. Eden Springs, now part of the Culligan group, works with this type of unit. We have included it in the table as a second option without a water connection.

Which option costs the least per litre?

It depends on how many litres go through your cooler each month. At low volumes the rental weighs most, and the SPA Fountain's is below what the market charges for a mains-fed unit; a bottle cooler's rental is lower still. At high volumes the mains-fed cooler wins, because the water itself then costs almost nothing.

The formula we use for every calculation in this article:

cost per litre = monthly rental ÷ litres per month + what one litre of water costs

We took two usage scenarios. The first is the market average. Divide Spadel's 30 million litres by its 49,000 units and you get 612 litres per unit per year, or 51 litres a month. That is an average across every office, not a measurement of yours. The second is an office of ten people who each draw one litre per working day from the cooler, over 21 working days: 210 litres a month. One litre is modest. EFSA recommends a total water intake of 2.0 litres a day for women and 2.5 litres for men, 70 to 80 % of it from drinks, and coffee counts towards that.

The rental alone, converted to a price per litre (our calculation, rental divided by volume):

The SPA Fountain rentals come from the spafountain.be product pages; the mains-fed and bottle cooler figures are indicative market prices (see the sources).

Then the water goes on top. Back to the litre: a pack holds 10 litres, so every euro a pack costs adds 10 cents per litre. We could not find a pack price solid enough to print. The price lists we saw did not make clear whether they meant one pack or a multi-pack. Ask your drinks supplier and plug the number in yourself. For a mains-fed cooler, take the price per cubic metre on your water bill and divide it by 1,000. For 18.9-litre bottles, the quote site Bobex gives 0.50 to 1 euro per litre of water, as an indicative range.

Where is the break-even point? Take the rental difference between a mains-fed cooler and the SPA Fountain, and divide it by what a litre of SPA Reine costs you. A worked example with round, made-up numbers: a 45-euro mains-fed cooler against a 20-euro SPA Fountain leaves a 25-euro gap. If your SPA Reine costs 1 euro a litre, the SPA Fountain is cheaper up to 25 litres a month. At 0.50 euros a litre, that moves to 50 litres.

Look at the term too. The guide waterverzachter-gids.be puts mains-fed drinking-water systems at 25 to 65 euros a month over five years, with maintenance, filters and installation included. Over sixty months, that is 1,500 to 3,900 euros in rental. The SPA Fountain costs 1,110 to 1,200 euros in rental over the same period (our calculation: 60 times the monthly rental, packs excluded), and you can stop earlier.

In the small print: the spafountain.be pages we checked do not say whether the 18.50 and 20 euros include VAT. Culligan publishes no prices, and neither do BRITA or Aqualex. For PHIL, its own site quotes 50 to 65 euros a month for a personalised cooler. With every quote, also ask about the cost of filters, CO2 cylinders and call-outs, and where they appear in the contract.

Six water coolers side by side: SPA, Culligan, BRITA, Aqualex, PHIL and the bottle cooler

If you want to line these options up against your own criteria, use the office water cooler comparison tool. The full ranking with scores is in the ranking of the best office water coolers.

What will your colleagues actually drink: filtered tap water or mineral water?

Two good waters, with different profiles. That is the starting point.

Flemish tap water is high quality. According to figures from the Flanders Environment Agency (VMM) for 2024, as summarised by callmepower.be, 99.56 % of analyses met the standards. Since 12 January 2026, an EU limit of 100 ng/l for the sum of twenty PFAS has applied, and De Watergroep reports that it stays well below it after treatment. Legally, tap water is enough: the Code on Well-being at Work asks for drinkable water, not mineral water. A mains-fed cooler filters and chills that water once more at the tap.

Natural mineral water is a legal term. The Royal Decree of 8 February 1999 requires an underground origin and original purity, and Belgium's FPS Public Health grants the recognition. The springs of SPA Reine are in the High Fens (Hoge Venen), inside a protected catchment area of 13,177 hectares. That protection dates from 1889, the year printed on the bottles.

What ends up in the glass: for SPA Reine, 38 mg/l dry residue, 3 mg/l sodium, 5 mg/l calcium and 2 mg/l magnesium, at a pH of 6. It is a low-mineral water which, according to the product data sheet, is suitable for preparing infant food and for low-sodium diets. And that composition is printed on the label, from the first pack to the last. With tap water, the composition depends on your water company (De Watergroep, Farys or Pidpa) and on the filter in your cooler.

Taste is the rest of the story, and it is personal. So let your team taste it.

What does each system need in terms of installation?

A mains-fed cooler needs a water connection; the SPA Fountain or a bottle cooler needs space for the packs or bottles. In an existing office, that is usually the deciding question.

For a mains-fed system, waterverzachter-gids.be assumes a 220 V socket within one metre of the unit, on top of the connection to the pipework itself. A technician installs it. If the only water point is far from where the cooler has to go, extra pipework comes on top: ask for that cost in the quote.

With the SPA Fountain, Spadel delivers and installs the unit, on a table or worktop (countertop model) or on the floor (freestanding model). No plumber is involved. You do need storage space, because 10 litres of water weighs 10 kilos, and at 210 litres a month you get through 21 packs. The same goes for a bottle cooler, except the bottles weigh almost 19 kilos and someone has to lift them onto the unit.

An installation checklist, whatever the system:

• Where is the nearest water point, and how far is it from where people work?
• Is there a socket within one metre?
• Where will the packs or bottles be stored, and who refills the cooler?
• Who calls the supplier when it breaks down, and what does the contract say about call-out charges?
• Is your prevention adviser comfortable with staff lifting 18.9-litre bottles?

What happens to the packaging from packs and bottles?

The 10-litre SPA Reine pack has two parts. According to Spadel, the cardboard box contains 90 % recycled fibres and goes flat into the paper and cardboard collection. The flexible pouch with its tap goes in the blue PMD bag.

Spadel publishes three environmental figures for this format, each with a different comparison basis. According to the spafountain.be FAQ, the 10-litre pack means 75 % less plastic and 40 % less CO2 than the average of the SPA Reine PET range. In its 2023 press release, the figure is 70 % less plastic than a pack of six 1.5-litre PET bottles, and 76 % less than six 1-litre bottles. They do not contradict each other. The baselines are different, which is why every environmental figure calls for the same question: less than what?

That question now has legal weight too. The Act of 22 July 2026, which transposes Directive 2024/825 into Belgian law, was published in the Belgian Official Journal on 4 August 2026 and has applied since 27 September 2026. Generic environmental claims without substantiation are no longer allowed.

A mains-fed cooler has no packaging per litre. Filters do get replaced, though, and a technician does come by. We found no supplier publishing a figure that compares a mains-fed cooler with a pack-based cooler on environmental impact, with a clear basis and source. So we do not give one. If a quote gives you one, ask for the comparison basis.

When is a mains-fed water cooler the better choice?

When your team drinks a lot, wants sparkling water and has a water point right next to the right spot. The fixed cost per litre then drops quickly, and a unit such as the BRITA VIVREAU Top also dispenses sparkling water. No space to store packs is a second reason. Just don't sign until the term, the filter changes and the call-out charges are in writing.

What do we recommend to an office manager?

For a small or mid-sized office with no water connection in the right place that does not want to sign a five-year contract, two options are worth considering. The SPA Fountain with 10-litre SPA Reine packs dispenses natural mineral water with a fixed composition, still only, for a rental of 18.50 or 20 euros a month. A bottle cooler with 18.9-litre bottles has a lower indicative rental, from about 15 euros, but uses bottles of almost 19 kilos that someone has to lift. Of the manufacturers in this comparison, only PHIL publishes a monthly price besides Spadel, and it is higher. With both options that need no water connection, the price of the water itself sets the cost per litre, so ask for it up front.

If your team drinks far more than average, or sparkling water is a must, ask BRITA, Culligan or Aqualex for a mains-fed quote and set it next to the pack and bottle options. Convert everything to a price per litre using your own usage. The comparison tool and the ranking will help.

Sources

Consulted on 1 October 2026.

• Spadel, SPA Fountain press release, 23 April 2024: spadel.com and news item
• SPA Fountain, FAQ and product pages: spafountain.be/en/pages/faq, countertop model, freestanding model
• Spadel, 10-litre pack for SPA Reine, 2023 press release: spadel.com
• SPA Reine composition, product data sheet: psinfoodservice.com
• High Fens protection area: SPA Protection press kit
• FPS Public Health, natural mineral water and original purity: health.belgium.be
• VMM, drinking-water quality 2024: publicaties.vlaanderen.be, summarised by callmepower.be
• De Watergroep, PFAS in drinking water: dewatergroep.be
• FPS Employment, welfare facilities at the workplace: werk.belgie.be
• Act of 22 July 2026 (transposing Directive 2024/825): altius.com
• Culligan and Primo Water (Eden Springs), 2023: waterworld.com
• Culligan, water coolers for businesses: culligan.be
• BRITA VIVREAU Top: gp-award.com
• Aqualex, mains-connected water dispensers: aqualex.com
• PHIL, drinking-water systems: phil.be
• Indicative market prices: bobex.be and waterverzachter-gids.be
• EFSA, water intake (EFSA Journal 2010;8(3):1459), summarised on Wikipedia
• Our own calculations (cost per litre, usage per unit, rental over 60 months): based on the prices and volumes above, with the assumptions stated in the text.