Battery power?

Does anyone know if you can run lights for extended periods of time by using a car battery? I have a tree house me and my dad built when I was about 10 and would be the perfect spot to grow, if I could get power up there, but it's kind of out of the way and a power cable would be obvious.

Would it work if you took speaker wire and tied one to the positive and one to the negative and wrapped the cable around the bulb? Or would it explode/be really unsafe?

Besides being enormously dangerous, even if you were to do it safely you wouldnt want to use a car battery. You would be lucky if it didn't die after the first day. In a car, the battery is only used to turn the car on and then the alternator becomes the power source after that. You would be running the battery nonstop for at least 18 hours a day without a second power source, which it is not built to do.

its totaly possible to run a few cfl's for extended periods with a battery, you will need a deep cycle battery because a regular starter battery dosnt last long when you keep draining them and then charging back up, but a deep cycle battery is made to do just that, now the next problem, regular cfl's run on ac power and the battery puts out dc so no you cant just hook them together you would need to get a power inverter that hooks to the battery and converts the dc power to 50/60 hz ac, your best bet would be to get 2 batterys so one could be charging while the other is powering the grow....or you could do what i did to my tree house when i was a kid, i took the roof off it and covered it with clear plastic and made a green house, i even grew in there through the winter by putting a battery with a boat spotlight on it with a timer that came on for a few minutes in the night to interupt the dark cycle, the problem i had with trying to use lights in my shed was that there were so many light leaks that the thing lit up like a x-mas tree at nights thats why i had to go with the greenhouse aproach, o rdepending on the place you could always put them on the roof of the treehouse

it is 100% possible to use a battery to power cfl's. I have this in my current setup. let me explain

in the country i currently reside, there are power cuts of around 8 hours a day roughly.

to combat this i use a large truck battery linked up to 200watts of cfl's which are also linked to the mains.

what this means is when the mains is here, the battery gets charged, when the mains goes, the cfl's stay powered without a flicker, as to not harm the plants in anyway.

This system is called a UPS backup and is used in a lot of office setups to protect servers etc.

Don't bother. WHile where there is a will there is a way, I bet it would be a long time before it paid off. I would be able to give suggestions much easier had you included pictures or your tree house, but I would think that if you can replace the roof and possibly the walls you could in essence have yourself an elevated greenhouse. Plexi-glass can get very expensive very quick, but would probably work the best. Corrugated fiberglass will allow in much less light , but still you might pull it off. Heavy duty clear plastic (I would suggest 10 mil+) might hold up depending if anything pierces it. If you could provide adequate airflow and provide a steady water supply you might really have something interesting. GL
SP