Hello, it has been years since I have visited the Other Power. I have some old Harbor freight 45 watt panels on my roof and I haven't checked for a very long time if they are charging my 12 volt batteries. Recently I checked and there is no power to the batteries so I checked the wires from the panels going into the regulator and found that there is no DC voltage going in but there is around 48 AC volts. First off, I always thought they were producing DC voltage, secondly, if they are to produce AC, is there a bridge rectifier within the harbor freight regulator that converts it to DC? Lastly, I had some old bridge rectifiers laying around from my old wind turbine system. I tried connecting the AC power from the solar panels to the rectifier but it dd not get converted to DC. I am not the best when it comes to understanding this stuff, so am I doing something wrong here?
Any advice is appreciated, Thank you