I needed new batteries for my pepper grinder, and ended up going down a vast rabbit hole.

First, I purchased 15 different brands/models of Alkaline AAA batteries from Amazon. (This cost about $150, which means that I strongly overpaid to run a pepper mill.)

Then I built a test rig for at 15 battery types. (It’s a redic long video, but you can see the process at 50x speed which only takes a couple of minutes!)

And used that to make the video at the top of this page, after running a 100 hour test.

The spreadsheet with the raw data and calculated results for the tests is available on Google Docs:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-wWU2XRqiwQYu8Mf14S9t1k3e9BCGTiulbm4DLLoztk

And you can watch me further discuss the spreadsheet as well.

Updates

YouTube user autismspeaks brought up a good point about name-brand batteries having a lower self-discharge rate than cheaper batts.

So I decided to set a pair of each type aside for a few years (except for the Rayovac Industrials because I’d only bought an 8-pack and used all of them).

I’ll admit this looks like a kindergarten arts and crafts project.

Whether I’ll ever get back to it? That’s another matter entirely.