The new boat is arriving with 1 starter battery and no leisure batteries. It has a smaller alternator fitted to recharge the starter battery, and a 175Amp alternator for charging the leisure batteries once I fit them. So, again, I'm facing the old age issue of batteries, recharging, and ensuring we have enough power onboard when disconnected from our marina. (which if I have my way will be as often as possible.) Generating power is a long subject. The solutions are solar, generator, or running the boat engine. Basically, it all begins with how much power you demand, in order to be happy. If I tell the kids, computers and XBox are off, for 3 weeks while we cruise, they aren't the happiest. One option is to have a BIG bank of batteries...which you charge up on shorepower before leaving on long trips...and then hope the alternator recharges them while you cruise. The other option is to have less batteries and buy a gennie, or solar panel. In my experience, if you are a heavy power user, the solar panel wont keep up with your continual drain of battery power. Solar is fine if you only use a few appliances (like a laptop), but I have some suspicions that solar lies to the invertor. While the sun is shining, the battery voltage shows a high value...but when the sun is gone, the battery voltage can dive down to it's actual value....and suddenly your invertor is beeping....and you say to yourself....we had sun all day.....but of course you were taking all the amps the solar panels were supplying and eating them up...and not leaving anything over to recharge batteries. When not on shorepower, I tend to switch an inverter on permanently. Mainly because I dont have 12V supplies for our tvs, laptops, cell chargers etc. ...everything runs off 220V. Lights are 8Watts energy saving bulbs, and you only need one in each room, just like in a house. They work well on side walls in half moon lamp holders. We're having a 220V fridge...cheap £100 from Argos or Tesco. Same with the freezer. (which we will switch off when away from a marina.) I know the invertor uses some battery power to run, but I'm going to live with it. The challenge therefore, is to not allow the battery voltage to drop below 11.9Volts, else the invertor will beep, and we'll lose power to everything. (for this reason, I'll have a few 12V LED lights installed as backups as well.... anyway...we have yobs outside the boat...so cutting this short :)