norman99 wrote:
Challenges are there to be met.
There are two routes - A bigger/better battery supply or less power consuming equipment.
A normal car battery is designed to give lots of current on a few demands. Mobile homes have Leisure batteries and they are designed to give lower currents over longer periods.
But fitting an extra battery is expensive and more importantly bulky.
So what of low power consumption equipment?
What is the lowest power consuming good quality CCTV camera?
IR lighting - is there a way to have low level IR lighting until movement is detected?
You can fit IR emitters - they don't need much range. Low power consumption cameras would mean manual iris / bullet stuff. Ebay is full of them, but the image quality is sketchy.
You'd need a separate deep-cycle battery installed in the car with a automatic cutoff switch that would connect / charge the extra battery while you are driving but disconnect / not allow you to drain the primary battery if you leave the cameras running too long.
There's a solid state single-channel DVR all over ebay that uses an SD car to record video/audio - that would give you longest life. I still wouldn't expect more than 2-3 days on that extra battery, but at least the cutoff will mean you don't drain your main battery.
Multiple channel DVRs tend to need HDs and be power-hogs. My system uses about 3 to 4 amps steady state. That's 4 cameras, a GPS antenna, power timer, video overlay device and a 4channel DVR with a 250GB laptop hard drive in it.