The chocolate fountain is apparently not for Bar Mitvah's anymore. We own one. You can, too. We got ours from Zabar's, but you can get the same one (Hershey's Brand) for about $35 by Googling and looking. Its cheap, but its worked for us twice so far. If you want a better brand of home chocolate fountain (perhaps Swiss relatives are coming and staying for several weeks?) you can try Sephra's home line. Sephra makes the large commercial fountains that you see at catered affairs. Those models cost several thousand dollars. Their home models have several temperature settings, dishwasher safe parts, and don't require you to pre-melt the chocolate prior to placing it in the fountain. They are also useful for more traditional fondue toppings, which include "caramel, cheese, BBQ sauce, and even Ranch dressing." (I did not make this up).
Since we have the cheap fountain, I melted the chocolate in a double boiler first. Unless you use very dark chocolate which has a very high fat content, you will need to add oil to improve the viscosity of the chocolate in the fountain. One piece of advice is don't show the guests how much oil you actually have to add: I didn't the first time I used the fountain but didn't add enough this time and everyone witnessed me pouring oil into the fountain. If no one was looking I would have added even more oil. The instructions called for even more!!! Although everyone was temporarily grossed out by the oil, this, as you can see from the picture, soon passed.
My one piece of advice is that semi-sweet chocolate melts easier and tastes better than milk chocolate, although I would use perhaps 25% milk chocolate to make the kids happy. And don't be afraid of the oil. After all, you're adding it to chocolate!
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