I thought of my house as just a big caravan. The powerpoints were all powered by a 5 kva generator at first. Then we quickly worked out two things, It's noisy, it stinks and it costs a packet to run. So, I bought a smaller 650 watt generator. This was cheaper to run and quieter buy didn't power much.

Then I worked out that the vehicles had built in generators. My wife at the time had a courier van and I ran a taxi truck.We both did around 350 - 400 Km per day so why not use the vehicle batteries for lighting and out little tv set.

Bear in mind that I was winging it. I knew nothing! I had never heard of duel battery systems or the like. People will tell you why you can't do this. Well, we knew no better so we did it anyway.

I fixed up a plug on each vehicle and set up a couple of 12 volt power points in the house. These were the old brown Bakelite type and I mounted them on the floor so that they were not likely to be confused with proper 240 VAC outlets. These were both connected to a plug at one end of the house.

At the other end of the house I had an identical plug that fed the lights which were wired with automotive wire through the roof with string pull switches. These switches reduced the length of wire needed to run to a switch rather than the normal architrave switches. I also didn't want to mess with the existing wiring.
This system worked really well and was fairly cheap to set up.

We found that on the first really cold morning of the winter the van or truck wouldn't start as we had killed the battery by deep cycling it. So we jump started it and headed into Kmart for a new (cheap) battery.

I did try an big expensive heavy duty truck battery in my truck for one year but it lasted no longer than a cheap car battery and cost over twice the price.

Before I go I'll leave you with an amusing story.

One evening I headed to to local pub for a few brews with a mate of mine. The Werribee Banner had recently done a story on me regarding running without mains power that had ended up on page one. Someone, who was slightly under the weather saw my mate and thought that he was me. He than started asking my mate how we did it. First off my mate had to convince him that he wasn't me and that I was (you really had to be there, but even this was funny as).

Anyway this bloke eventually got around the the question I had been asked soooooooooooooo many times... What did we do about watching TV. I made up this long complicated explanation about how we had taken the works out of an old kero fridge and hooked it up to the TV. This drew quite a crowd of more and more inebriated people. I almost got away with it too until an electrician butted in.

Anyhoo I'll leave it here for today. Take care and stay well.