Years ago I salvaged everything. I worked as a carpenter for many years and before we built our house managed to accumulate many things from electrical boxes, to doors & windows, to plumbing fixtures.
One of the things I've been wanting to change for quite a while is this old fuse box. (Code minded) people will cringe, but for 30+ years we've used an old 60-amp fuse box - Palmer Electric & Mfg, Wakefield , MA - for our 12VDC circuits. The transitions on this wall are interesting.
Here's what it looked like in 2007. We had our old Sencenbaugh 12V turbine and about 350 watts of PV. The water heater was an open-hood Aquastar, and the timer - I'd forgotten about - split our battery bank, and temporarily reconfigured it to 24V to fill the cistern (24V pump).
Shortly after this we moved thing over to 48V, added a new Ourtback inverter, about 3 kW of PV, and most recently our 15' axial (also 48V). We kept many 12VDC outlets and lights; just because. The 12V loads we've paired down to a relative small percentage of total. They come off a 12V "tap" that gets balanced with a converter/equalizer. Here's what it looks like now:
I added an OB DC Main and a Murata digital volt meter.
Among the challenges was that the wall this was on is only 2 x 3 (2-1/2") framing, and some anal young(er) home-owner stapled the wires about 12" O.C. up to the old box. Hence the hole saw cut-outs.