Five years ago, my efforts to hard boil an ostrich egg ended in undercooked disappointment. This year, I set out to correct that failure — and then some.

An ostrich egg is similar to a common chicken egg in many ways: there is a yolk; there is a white; and there is a shell composed mostly of calcium carbonate. The main difference is that it’s about two dozen times bigger. That size difference makes for appealing pageantry among the foodie set, of which I am an occasional interloper.

In 2013, I acquired a fresh ostrich egg over the internet, gathered a handful of friends one evening, and tried to hard boil the egg. Expectations were high as I sliced through the shell with a Dremel, but then: disaster. Beyond a thin outer layer of cooked egg white, we found little more than a sad, gloopy mess. The yolk wasn’t the least bit set. Lesson learned: an hour on the boil isn’t even close to enough time to hard boil an ostrich egg.

This year, I decided to try again. I resolved to taste naught but sweet success. Or savory success. Or whatever ostrich egg tastes like.

I ordered two fresh unfertilized ostrich eggs from Floeck’s in New Mexico. A couple days later, they arrived wrapped in layers of bubble wrap and really cute baby diapers. Even though they didn’t really require refrigeration — we refrigerate chicken eggs in America primarily because their natural protective coatings are usually stripped during processing — I stuck them in the fridge.

Why two eggs? It’s not like one would have been insufficient, as they each had a mass of about 1.5 kg. Instead, I got two so that this time I’d have a “practice” egg. If I screwed that one up, perhaps by once again under-cooking it, I’d be able to recover with the second one.

The practice egg went into a pot of boiling water the night before I was going to have some friends over for brunch. After two hours on the boil, I removed the egg, gave it a spin, stopped the spin, and then let go again: the egg remained stationary. Had the egg resumed spinning, that would have indicated that liquid was still present inside, and so I would have cooked it some more. Instead, I plunged it into a cold ice bath while I got my hacksaw from the garage.

In a process that was repeated the next morning with the second egg, I sawed slowly around the circumference and chased the cut with a sharp knife to pierce the tough membrane that lined the interior of the shell. Then, slowly, I pulled off each end of the shell. A translucent white egg, gelatinous in appearance but firm in texture, was revealed.

Another cut was made, this one orthogonal to the saw line, splitting the egg into the two halves that are traditional for deviling.

From there, the deviling process was about the same as one would do if one were deviling chicken eggs: scoop out the yolk, mash in some mayo, brown mustard, garlic powder, cayenne pepper (dried), and Cholula (partially because of its acidity); put the mix into a piping bag; pipe back into the now-empty whites; and garnish with chives and paprika. For extra effect, I plated the eggs on beds of spinach leaves, which had the added benefit of keeping the eggs from sliding around.

My brunch guests and I agreed: ostrich egg tastes like chicken egg, perhaps ever so slightly “lighter”. And a deviled one? Heavenly.

UPDATE November 19, 2017: Since this post was made on October 3rd, 2017, I’ve done a number of additional tests on many more batteries. I’ll do a follow-up post eventually, but here are some new key results: first, the performance of a manufacturer’s AAA alkaline batteries is in no way predictive of the performance of a manufacturer’s AA alkaline batteries. As an example of that, Rayovac makes some of the lowest-capacity AAA alkaline batteries but some of the highest-capacity AA alkaline batteries. Second, there can be a surprising amount of variation within a manufacturer. Energizer is particularly poor in that respect, with their AA batteries manufactured in the USA and China significantly outperforming their AA batteries manufacturer in Indonesia and Poland.

For many years, I’ve been a loyal customer of Rayovac alkaline batteries. I thought they were just as good as Duracell and Energizer, they had strong reviews on Amazon, and they were cheap.

However, that worldview came to a shattered end when I read a review on Amazon for some Amazon Basics AAA alkaline batteries. In that review, the reviewer claimed to have measured the actual charge available in various brands of AAA alkalines, and they claimed that the Rayovac AAAs had performed especially poorly. Say it ain’t so! I decided to run my own tests, either to restore the honor of the Rayovac brand or to join the bandwagon throwing tomatoes at it.

For good measure, I decided to also test a couple of other brands of cheap AAA alkalines: the aforementioned Amazon Basics AAA alkaline, and the Harbor Freight AAA alkaline.

To do the testing, I used an Itech IT8511A+ programmable DC load along with some desktop software to control the DC load and record the results. One battery at a time would be placed in a single-AAA holder. The leads from the holder were split, with one pair of branches going to the load terminals on the front of the Itech and the other pair going to the “remote sense” terminals on the back of the Itech. By using separate lines for the load and for voltage sensing, I would avoid problems with voltage drop on the leads due to the current and the non-zero resistance of the wire. This “4-wire” arrangement is also used for measuring precision resistances for the same reason.

Battery capacity is load-dependent, with more capacity for lighter loads, so I used three different constant-current discharge rates for each brand of battery: 50 mA, 200 mA, and 500 mA. Those would simulate light loads like a remote control, medium loads like a toy, and heavy loads like an LED headlamp. I’d run each test with a fresh battery. The stopping voltage would be 800 mV for the 50 mA and 200 mA tests, and 500 mV for the 500 mA tests.

Why those voltages? That’s where the batteries were “dropping off a cliff” — i.e., almost entirely discharged. That’s also around the voltage where modern devices cease to work. Why 500 mV instead of 800 mV for the 500 mA trial? Due to internal resistance, the overall voltage was lower, and I saw that we’d be leaving something on the table if we stopped at 800 mV.

Here are some examples of what the discharge curves looked like in the battery analyzer software for each of the batteries at a 200 mA discharge rate:

 

 

 

After several days of testing, here are the results.

50 mA

1. Amazon Basics AAA alkaline — 1193 mAh
2. Harbor Freight AAA alkaline — 1078 mAh
3. Rayovac AAA alkaline — 1024 mAh

200 mA

1. Amazon Basics AAA alkaline — 937 mAh
2. Harbor Freight AAA alkaline — 829 mAh
3. Rayovac AAA alkaline — 604 mAh

500 mA

1. Amazon Basics AAA alkaline — 575 mAh
2. Harbor Freight AAA alkaline — 527 mAh
3. Rayovac AAA alkaline — 354 mAh

The Rayovacs were terrible! No wonder my Black Diamond LED headlamp, which pulls about 550 mA on its brightest setting and about 210 mA on its medium-intensity “side light” setting, always seemed to run through its three AAAs so quickly. I mean, look at those numbers: the Rayovacs at 200 mA had about the same capacity as the Amazons at 500 mA. The Rayovacs managed only 60% of the capacity of the Amazons at 500 mA. Ouch.

Admittedly, the problem was less pronounced at the lowest current drain in the test, but the Amazon batteries still had about 15% more capacity than the Rayovacs.

All of the batteries were fresh. The Rayovac batteries and Amazon batteries were obtained from Amazon, and the Harbor Freight batteries were obtained in person from my local Harbor Freight.

Don’t be fooled by the lower starting voltage of the Rayovac batteries in the 200 mA test screenshots above (1.48 V versus about 1.6 V for the other two). I did the test several times to make sure. Notably, they always started up above 1.6 V under no or light loads, so the cells were fresh, and since the same battery holder was used for all of the brands of batteries in all of the tests, it wasn’t an artifact of resistance in the holder.

Roughly 10% behind the Amazon batteries on every test — but way ahead of the Rayovacs — were the Harbor Freight batteries. Note that these are the Harbor Freight alkalines, not the Harbor Freight “heavy duty” batteries that they often give away in promotions. Still, they’re usually on “sale” for about $0.21 per battery, so they’re still pretty cheap. If you can get the Amazon batteries for less than about $0.23 per battery, that might be a better value, but I’ve found they’re usually slightly more than that.

Rayovac: it’s been great, but we need to break up. I’m an Amazon or Harbor Freight battery guy now.

I watched this year’s total solar eclipse from the path of totality, near Douglas, Wyoming, with my friends Tyler and Masaru. Rather than try to photograph the event, I chose to simply observe.

My 1250mm f/10 telescope with a solar filter cap gave us an up-close view as the moon slid across the disc of the sun. At first, there were no noticeable changes to the fields and hills around us, but gradually we became aware of the dimming light. Masaru mentioned how it looked like the world was underexposed by a stop or two.

I had a light meter out to track the progress of the eclipse in percentage terms. Before the eclipse started, with a very light haze from wildfires in Montana, the meter indicated 95,000 lux. At the halfway point, it read — not surprisingly — 48,000 lux. The numbers continued to drop as more of the sun was obscured. 40,000 lux. 20,000 lux. 10,000 lux. 5,000 lux. Soon, the meter indicated 1,000 lux — a 99% eclipse, about as bright as a well-lit lab bench, but still relatively normal outside. It was still impossible to look at the sun without a solar filter. The light kept dropping, 500 lux, then 100 lux — a 99.9% eclipse, and still too bright to look the sun unprotected. Between glances at the light meter, I watched the sun slip away through the telescope.

Only a small sliver of the sun’s disc remained, then just the pearls of light that are called “Bailey’s beads” (the last bits of light peeking through valleys on the moon’s surface), and then: it was gone. Totality!

I looked up at the now totally eclipsed sun. The brilliant white corona of the sun stretched satin fingers away from the now-occluded solar disc. Three red solar prominences danced away from the sun’s surface. The stars were out; the land was as dark as a full-moon night; a strange sunset circled us in the distance.

It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. (No exaggeration; I’m getting misty-eyed just thinking about it as I write this.) The 99.9% partial eclipse and the 100% total eclipse were profoundly different experiences. Totality was a million times better than even the 99.9% partial eclipse.

Two minutes and twenty seconds passed in totality. The moon moved on, and the sun popped back into view. We could no longer look skyward, so we watched daytime return to the land.

Then we sat in a 9-hour traffic jam as 500,000 people tried to drive from Wyoming back to Colorado all at the same time. Completely worth it.

We were having dinner when the flashes of lightning started.

Though early August, it was still technically the rainy season in Tamarindo, Costa Rica. Verdant, lush foliage surrounded our rented mansion of a house. The 18 of us were there to celebrate Kameron’s 30th birthday — or so we thought —  and it was our first night together as a complete group. Three sides of the giant kitchen/dining/living area in the house had expansive panoramic folding glass walls that we left open during the rain. There was enough overhang that we did not get wet.

The lightning’s pace became quicker and its menace deeper. Water poured off of the Tahitian-style roof of the house, some into one of the house’s several “infinity” pools, and some careening down the hill towards the beach a few hundred meters away. Soon, the sky was almost continuously lit by white flashes, and the closest ones were only a fraction of a Mississippi ahead of their stout BANGs.

I was sitting with Kameron, Casey, and Kyle, and we were enjoying the fruits of the house’s chef’s labors. Naturally, the discussion centered on Nature’s show and its ramifications. “At least the power hasn’t gone out,” Kameron observed.

Five seconds later, the power went out.

In theory, the house was supposed to have a standby generator for exactly such occasions. In practice, it did have a generator — but it refused to start. Candles were lit; ice cream was served. The lightning was all the more impressive when it had no meaningful competition from artificial lights.

Several hours later, the storm died down and the electricity came back.

Over the next week, we went surfing several times at the break in front of Tamarindo, lounged around the pools, and explored the area.  Costa Rica seemed relaxed whether we were in tourist traps or far away from any signs in English.

One exception was a delivery truck we encountered while driving back from Playa Negra to Tamarindo. The dirt road was narrow, rutted, and deeply potholed. We seldom exceeded 40 km/h in our rented Land Cruiser, but this guy seemed to be doing double that. He was all over the road; sometimes in his lane, sometimes in the oncoming lane, sometimes hugging the very edge of the shoulder. At first it seemed random, perhaps even suicidal, but gradually it became apparent that he was driving with intent. His route cleverly avoided the road’s faults, and his journey was much smoother than our own.

The biggest surprise of the trip came the morning of our second full day.

I got out of bed around sunrise and stumbled upstairs to the kitchen, half asleep and making a beeline for the coffee pot. Before I could get there, Casey and Kameron handed me a card in an envelope. “Should I open this now?” I asked, and they gave a warm response in the affirmative. The card told the story: the theme of the day was not to be a birthday celebration, as we had been expecting, but rather, a wedding! Instantly, I was awake; happiness is a powerful stimulant. I gave my congratulations to the two of them with a smile.

After spending the morning sailing on an 80ft schooner, including a stop for playing in the water in a secluded cove, we returned home for the lovely, simple, gracious, poolside wedding ceremony. In hindsight, I suppose a wedding made sense, since both sets of parents for the grooms were part of the group of 18, as was a grandmother, an aunt and uncle, a brother, and a close family friend — plus all of us who were the grooms’ more direct peers.

A delicious multi-course dinner followed, and joy abounded. A celebration of good living, past, present, and future.

A “clang-scrape-grind” noise coming from the engine bay is never a good sign; it’s even worse when it appears suddenly on a freeway off ramp. In our case, on Tyler’s 1970 MG Midget, the proximate cause was that the pulley had become very loose on the alternator’s shaft. Although we were able to resecure the pulley with a new Woodruff key and a new nut, that got us thinking:

Just how long would the Midget run without the alternator?

Some Googling produced no satisfying answers, so Tyler brought his Midget over to my garage and I brought out a variety of electronics test gear. Our plan: we’d carefully isolate and measure the current consumption of various subsystems in the car, we’d combine those numbers, and then we’d compare that to the charge held in the battery. Although these measurements were specifically for the Midget, they should be somewhat similar for other non-computerized, distributor-based ignitions systems.

Experimental setup

We assumed that we’e become aware rather quickly that the alternator had died and that we’d turn off any unnecessary gear. No radio, no electric fans, and certainly no headlights. No turn signals or brake lights, either.

Also, not all alternator failures are the same. With our lost bolt, the answer to “how far could we drive” would have been “a few miles,” since without the alternator there’s no tension on the belt to turn the water pump, and without the water pump, you have an overheating MG. (You might have an overheating MG even with a working water pump, but that’s what the cockpit heater is for.) Thus, for the sake of argument, let’s say that the alternator breaks in such a way that the rest of the car remains functional but the alternator is completely electrically disconnected from the rest of the car.

With all of the accessories switched off, and no computer in the picture, the current consumption is dominated by two subsystems: the ignition and the fuel pump.

Ignition

The ignition system consists of the coil, the condenser, the ignition module, the distributor, and the spark plugs. Originally, these cars came with points instead of an electronic ignition module, but they’re functionally identical for the purposes of this investigation.

A quick overview of the ignition cycle:

1. One side of the coil is always connected to +12 V
2. The ignition module (or points) connects the other (low) side of the coil to ground about halfway between the time of the previous spark and the time the next spark should happen
3. Current flows through the coil
4. The ignition module (or points) disconnects the low side of the coil
5. The coil “doesn’t like” its current being interrupted, so it “tries” to keep it going by increasing the voltage, up to several hundred volts
6. The secondary coil has this rising, higher voltage coupled into it (like a transformer)
7. Since the secondary coil has more windings/turns than the primary coil, the resulting voltage on the secondary is much higher than it had been on the primary (tens of thousands of volts)
8. The high voltage is directed to a particular spark plug by the distributor
9. The high voltage jumps across the gap in the plug, creating a spark in the cylinder
10. The voltage has dissipated, so the cycle repeats

A great visual explanation of this is on YouTube.

The key to understanding the current consumption of the ignition system is thus monitoring the current into the primary on the coil during the charging phase of the spark cycle.

To start, we checked the DC resistance of the primary side of the coil and found it to be 3.9 ohms. We then measured the inductance of the primary coil at 1 kHz using an LCR meter and found it to be 9.3 mH.

Next, we measured the current into the coil and ignition module by monitoring the voltage drop across a precision 10 milliohm shunt. Since we knew the voltage and the resistance, we could apply Ohm’s law to find the current through the shunt, i.e., 100 milliamps per millivolt, and thus the current being consumed by the ignition at a particular moment in time. If we observed the shunt voltage drop on an oscilloscope, we could see how the current consumption changed over time while the engine was running at, say, 1000 RPM:

Notice how the current consumption does not immediately jump to its maximum level. Instead, it slowly rises in an exponential curve. This is because the primary coil is an inductor, and inductors oppose changes in current. (The rise time turns out to be roughly what we’d expect based on our earlier measurements of the primary’s inductance and series resistance.)

To compute the average current consumption of the ignition at 1000 RPM, we’ll compute the discrete integral of the current with respect to time during one spark cycle and then multiply that by the number of spark cycles per second. The result will have units of amperes and will be the average current.

To do that from the scope shot, we’ll use an approach called the “trapezoid rule” to estimate the integral over one cycle:

3.3 A * 5.4 ms / 2 + 3.3 A * 14.1 ms = 54.4 mC

We can see that each spark cycle consumes 54.4 millicoulombs of charge — most of which is wasted as heat, since the only requirement for the discharge phase of the cycle is that the current has reached its maximum value. Knowing the charge per cycle, and the cycle period, we can find the average current:

54.4 mC * 1000 / 30.4 ms = 1.8 A

Thus, the average current consumed by the ignition system at 1000 RPM is 1.8 A.

How does that change at higher engine speeds? Let’s take a look at the current consumption at 3000 RPM:

At 3000 RPM, the current in the primary coil just barely reaches a full 3.3 A before being discharged to create a spark. Let’s compute the charge per cycle:

3.3 A * 6.9 ms / 2 = 11.4 mC

…and then the average current:

11.4 mC * (1000 ms / s) / 10.1 ms = 1.2 A

It’s lower! Yes, the mean ignition current decreases as engine speed increases.

However, you might notice a problem. If the engine speed were to increase even more, there would no longer be enough time for the coil to reach its nominal maximum current. That would mean less current change during the discharge phase of the cycle, which would mean a lower voltage at the spark plug. Eventually, with a high enough engine speed, there wouldn’t be enough voltage for a spark — but that speed would likely be far above the point where there would be other mechanical problems, such as the valves floating.

A related problem occurs when the battery voltage diminishes. The maximum current in the coil is a function of the coil resistance and the system voltage, so as the system voltage decreases, so too will the current in the coil. As with the high engine speeds, there will eventually be a point where the current change during discharge is insufficient to generate a voltage that will jump the spark gap, and the engine will no longer run.

One more observation: the current consumption of the ignition system is independent of anything happening on the secondary/distributor side of the system. The spark plug gap, plug wires, fuel mixture? None of that matters when it comes to the current consumption of the system.

Fuel pump

The fuel pump on the MG does not run all of the time. Instead, it runs only when the fuel line pressure has dropped below a particular threshold. When the car is idling, it won’t be using much fuel, so the fuel pump will run relatively rarely. When the car is under hard acceleration, it will be using a lot of fuel, so the fuel pump will run very frequently.

To measure the current consumption of the fuel pump, we put the current shunt in series with its supply wire in the wiring harness in the passenger footwell. When the pump was active, it made a “bloop” noise, and since we’re not sure exactly what the fuel pumping rate was, that will be our unit of measure. Here’s a scope shot of the charge consumed by one bloop:

The approximate definite integral of the current consumption with respect to time was:

3.5 A * 42 ms + 3.5 A * 37 ms / 2 = 212 mC

At idle, there was one bloop every 6.9 seconds:

As a result, the average current consumption of the fuel pump at idle was:

212 mC / 6.9 s = 31 mA

Unfortunately, we did not directly measure the current consumption of the fuel pump while we were zipping down the highway. Fuel consumption, and thus fuel pump current consumption, depends on the load on the engine and the efficiency of the engine at the particular rotational speed. Moreover, to use the idle values as a reference point, we’d need to know the power being produced by the engine at idle and the power required to maintain a particular speed.

After some investigation, we decided that a reasonable upper bound for traveling at highway speeds would be 10 times the fuel consumption at idle. That means the fuel pump would need to bloop ten times as often, which would make the mean current consumption:

31 mA * 10 = 310 mA

Given the scale of the fuel pump current consumption relative to the ignition, this is likely to be a sufficient estimate as long as we believe we’re within an order of magnitude of the actual number.

Other

In theory, the ignition and the fuel pump should have been the only things drawing power with the lights, electric fans, and radio off. However, when we checked the overall current consumption of the car by placing the ammeter in series with the battery, with the fuel pump and ignition disconnected and the car’s key in the “run” position, we found an additional average load of 600 mA.

At the time, we didn’t have an explanation for that. However, upon further reflection, I now believe it was an artifact of our experimental setup.

You see, we didn’t actually disconnect the alternator during these measurements. That wouldn’t matter for most things (other than keeping the voltage slightly higher and more stable than it otherwise would be), but it would matter when measuring the overall quiescent current drain of the car. The reason is that the alternator requires a non-trivial amount of current to keep its field coil energized. In our experimental premise, we stated that the alternator would be completely disconnected from the rest of the car’s electrical system, so the field coil current wouldn’t be a factor.

However, in a real-world situation, depending on the nature of the alternator failure, it would be possible for the alternator to fail to produce usable current but still be drawing current for its field coil. If you think that’s important, feel free to add it back in to the battery-life calculations below.

Combined average drain

Since a motionless running car isn’t much good, let’s assume that we’re going to drive on a highway with an engine speed of 3000 RPM. We simply sum the average ignition current for that speed and our estimated average fuel pump current to find our overall average:

1.2 A + 0.3 A = 1.5 A

Great! That equates to about 20 W, or less than a turn signal bulb.

Battery

Now that we know our average current drain, we need to figure out how long the battery can sustain that level of current without being charged by the alternator.

The battery in a 1970 MG Midget is a Group 51R lead-acid battery. Most brands in that size seem to have similar performance, so let’s use a Duralast for our calculations. The Group 51R Duralast has a specified “reserve capacity” of 75 minutes. That’s the amount of time that a fully charged battery will support a 25 A load before dropping below 10.5 V. We need amp-hours, which we can find using:

75 min * (1 hr / 60 min) * 25 A = 35.1 A-hr

Under the light loads we’re considering here, a 12 V lead-acid car battery’s voltage is “falling off a cliff” by the time it hits 10.5 V, so 35.1 A-hr really is about the most usable charge we can expect to extract.

Putting it all together

With those calculations done, we can find how long we can drive! Simply divide the amp-hour capacity of the battery by the current being drawn by the ignition and fuel pump to determine the number of hours of run time:

35.1 A-hr / 1.5 A = 23.4 hours

Wow, almost a day!

That’s assuming, of course, that you don’t have your headlights on, which is going to be tough if you want to drive that long. With the headlights on, your current consumption will increase by about 10 A, so your overall average consumption would be:

1.5 A + 10 A = 11.5 A

…and thus the amount of time you could run on battery alone with your headlights on would be:

35.1 A-hr / 11.5 A = 3 hours

Still lots of time, but a good incentive to take a direct route home.