Can I power a simple webcam, motion sensor and recoder by using a
solar panel to keep a battery charged? If so, were do i find the
details please?

You can, but opimizing will be complicated. If you don't mind paying
for some over kill, buy a xPower emergency power generator (about $100
at Walmart) Connect a $300 or $400 solar pannel (one square yard or
more) to the charger input jack. Direct sun light needs to fall on the
entire pannel at least 4 hours per week.  More if the recorder runs
more than an hour per week. The solar panel needs to be designed for
12 volts; they typically produce 18 volts at no load. The xPower has a
built in load controller. The built in inverter can supply up to 300
watts, 60 hertz, contineously. 600 watts peak. The battery has 21 anp
hours capacity. You can connect an additional 12 volt battery up to
several hundred amp hours to the heavy duty jumper cable leads if you
need more capacity. You probably don't. xPower can simultaineously
supply up to 12 amps dc from the cigarette lighter type jack and more
from the jumper cable clamps.  Neil

Unfortunately there is no provision for a motion detector to turn the
inverter off and on, so the inverter will run the battery down if it
is cloudy for a few days even suppling only the 10? watts needed by
the motion detector. For high reliability, you may need several square
yards of solar pannel and/or full sun 10 AM to 3PM almost every day.
xPower shuts off the inverter when the battery voltage drops to 10
volts to avoid damaging the battery. Better would be a 12 volt motion
detector that switches on an inverter (100 watts may be enough/that's
12 amps the motion detector must switch) I don't know if any one makes
such a thing at a reasonable price.  Neil

Most equipment that is powered from a low voltage DC can be powered
with Solar Electricity. I would suggest the use of a low voltage CCD
camera like those available in electronics or sercurity stores, along
with a low voltage video transmitter to send the images back to the
processing PC. You will need to calculate the energy consumption of
the camera and transmitter and engineer your solar power equipment
around these requirements. Your motion detection can be performed at
the host PC using software like "ConquerCam".

These links may provide useful information:

http://www.howstuffworks.com/question418.htm
http://www.howstuffworks.com/solar-cell.htm

Webcam, motion sensor and recorder together consume around 30 watts.
One cell provides around 0.5 watts. So you must use 150 cells, taking
into consideration that the sun doesn't shine all the time.

Obviously that would be very costly. My suggestion is that you use
your electric supply for powering your equipment and have a battery
back-up in case there is a power cut.

Thank you.